>> I'm going to wait about a week for him to calm down before writing
>> to him again. But if anyone has their own conciliatory words to
>> send to him, I confirmed his e-mail: corvus13(a)hotmail.com.
> Can someone give me a brief resume (by private email if you don't
> want to stir old coals) as to what happened.
Corvus added a bunch of "folklore" sections to articles about
minerals, containing a lot of new age crystal healing stuff.
The text was not attributed to any particular school of belief or
source. Also, it looked like a cut-and-paste job, since the English
looked archaic and had odd capitalization. A few of us asked Corvus
to identify a non-copyrighted source, to rewrite the stuff in modern
English, and to identify where the beliefs come from. He took that
personally for some reason (as if we were "accusing" him of something-
-which was manifestly not the case), and stomped off.
I'm not sure we should waste any time on these folks (i.e., those
Wikipedians who occasionally take offense and leave). Being able to
see your own ideas from other points of view is a necessary skill
here, as is having a thick skin. If people are upset by aspects of
the process we have deemed important, then trying to attract them
back will have one of three results: (1) We just piss him off again;
(2) We compromise the process out of misplaced guilt to keep him from
leaving; or (3) He grows a spine, gets with the program, and stays.
Obviously, we want (3). But if the person is capable of that and
has stuff to say, he'll come back after he cools off regardless of
what we do, as Manning apparently did. Anything we do is more likely
to lead to (1) or (2). So if people leave, let 'em. If they come
back, welcome them back. But let's not go out of our way to analyze
every reason some person leaves and beat ourselves up. If we do
everything right, some people will still get pissed off and leave.
That's life.
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