--- David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think the AfD response to that particular page was completely reasonable. If that guy was upset about his treatment here in this instance, then that's just his problem. They did not need to "COOL IT" "FOR FUCKS SAKE". Any chance you could be less rude? I'm in "self-righteous denial" just because I didn't heartily endorse your comment? Come on. It's quite reasonable to question your example, particularly when it doesn't really demonstrate any problems of the sort you claim it does. perception of unreliability, and not from how we treat questionably-notable people who decide to write encyclopedia articles about themselves. -- Matt Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com ___________________________________________________________ Win a BlackBerry device from O2 with Yahoo!. Enter now. http://www.yahoo.co.uk/blackberry

"David Gerard" wrote My past experience, not always but sometimes, is that phrases like "PR nightmare" can be used as a smokescreen for doing the 'wrong thing'. As in: why are we not doing the 'right thing' here? Well, it would be a 'PR nightmare'. Or in other words, having maturity enough to get round to admitting the organisation is fallible makes image management harder. (Of course, image management for an organisation that is infallible is like falling off a log.) To get back to WP and David's point, which is not invalid by any stretch of the imagination, we should continue to delete pages about living people that are clearly self-promotional rather than informative. We actually cannot screen out the creation of such pages, so we have to delete them. We enfranchise anyone who can type, so there is going to be some juvenilia posted. Our PR line actually must factor that in: we are not EB, you don't have to have an office in a prestigious academic institution for your opinion about what goes in WP to matter to _us_. So, yeah, some ignorant things are said. But, look, who exactly is fighting to combat ignorance on such a broad and accessible front, as of January 2006? I agree with David that people should be calm, cool and collected as they go about their business; and with Morven that profanity has not very much to do with achieving that aim. Charles