At 03:50 AM 1/19/03 -0800, you wrote:

Ah, sorry, I probably should have sent this both to the main and the tech. There are both a tech and a policy issues here...

I am very upset

very

Yesterday, I wanted to put something on the "what to do with wikipedia.org" page on meta

Then I realised I could not edit this page because

1. It was made with plenty of special characters and

my editing would break all of them

How could editing the page break all the special characters?

2. The page was too long anyway, so my editing would

remove the end the page

The page displays and edits well enough on my old thinkpad using explorer. It's long, but not yet to the massive length. I suppose you were useing netscape.

So, with the best of my energy, I opened this brand new Opera 6, that sure indeed handle the utf stuff (so at least I didnot mess with this)

Then, I noticed two things

1. Opera 6 handles very unwell some return to lines

(it seems to transform curiously texts edited in other editors, and misunderstand returns)

2. For about 1 save among 2, It just crashed, so I had

to do all over again

Consequently, since I want to edit this page without breaking it, since I know other people also have this length issue with their browser, and since I think some of the stuff is less important than others, and can easily be moved to something like a sub page

I decided to break that page in more pieces. It was to late to put everything back into good shape. So I did only part of it, still it took me more than half an hour, and it was painful to do (restart the browser 8 times)

I took time to explain why I was doing it, in the comments, and on brion talk page

I didn't look at the brion talk page but there is nothing by either you or mav in the talk page for the article itself.

This morning, I discover that what I tried to do was considered a sort of vandalism. Everything reverted, and more people add things on top of it.

As a conclusion

1. I can't do any revert back, or it will lose the new

stuff 2. I lost my time yesterday 3. I can't edit that page again, without breaking things up, or making some stuff disappear. In other words, either I am a vandal (if I edit) or I am censored (If I don't) 4. What I did was utterly misconsidered, and abused by Mav, who didnot even "try" to understand why I was doing it.

So, I am very upset

Well, I've looked at this for a while (wasted my 15 minutes) and I'm pretty confused. I was struck by your remark that some parts were more important than others... Not sure what you then did. Part of this seems to be trying a new browser, part just a general feeling of feeling flustered. I guess try, try again. When you have the time and patience.

Fred