Greetings,
Well, I must admit that I'm quite perplexed! In just one day, I have been transmogrified from a British student of Computer Science into an Iowan anarchist! Did my British accent not come across in the message? ;)
Seriously, though, perhaps I did get a bit overheated in my response last night, for which I apologise. Since Lir did not immediately post a defence, I guessed that perhaps he had left the mailing list, and I don't like the idea of attacking people who are not around to defend themselves. You know, fair play and all that. :) As it turns out, Lir is still on the list, but even so, I still think he means well (even if he goes about things the wrong way), and deserves a bit of a defence. I don't like the idea of writing people off.
Now it seems that in defending Lir and some of his points, I have become a valid target for abuse. *sigh*
I won't go into a point-by-point defence of my arguments again right now, as perhaps I didn't express them very well, and it would be better to plan them in my own time with a cool head. I have no intention of getting into a flame war. Perhaps I will put some of my points on my user page later, if that's all right with everyone. For now, I would prefer to concentrate on doing some university work and doing my bit to improve (hopefully!) the Wikipedia itself.
In the meantime, if anyone thinks that I may be doing Bad Things to the Wikipedia, please feel free to check through my user contributions. They go back to 8th November, which was when I first registered a user name - I was using the term "newbie" relatively. If anyone has any problems with any of my edits (and as far as I am aware no-one has made any specific complaints, apart from one or two minor edit skirmishes), please feel free to let me know about them, either by e-mail or in my Talk page. Similarly, I would be interested to know (preferably off-list) where I ever hinted that I might want to "act up" or that I might not be "prepared to share in the collegial spirit of mutual respect". You've got me quite baffled there. Oh yes, and as for my grammatical skills, I'm always happy to hear how I can improve them. :)
Oh, perhaps I should point out that my agreement with the "pronounced Paree, you morons" thing was a joke, of course.
Two points to close with:-
(1.) Could we please not use this mailing list for personal attacks on people, whether they are here to defend themselves or not. I know that this list is not subject to the NPOV rule, but calling people "twits" and so on is simply not constructive.
(2.) Could we please not make assumptions about people that are based on little or no evidence. Such disregard for the need for evidence casts serious doubt on one's standards of scholarship, and hence on the reliability of any information one might contribute to an encyclopaedia.
Thanks,
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+