Christopher Granade wrote:
Timwi wrote:
So far I have addressed only the "problem" of people not knowing whether what they are reading is really what the author wrote. People complaining about edits is a whole other matter. To address that problem, we must think about why they are complaining. I am convinced that the large majority of such complaints are solely out of irrational, thoughtless behaviour: people just assume that they "own" their comments by default, and complain about any form of "tinkering" even when it's perfectly legitimate if they thought about it for only a second. Surely you can't agree to let this kind of stupidity take precedence over our wiki philosophy.
I have two major issues with this comment. First, your tone is very confrontational, and is far more aggressive than the situation calls for. Please, let's keep civil here.
I've read it again and again and I don't see anything confrontational or aggressive about it. Either way, I never mean to be confrontational or aggressive, but I make a point of arguing logically and rationally. It tends to yield more meaningful conclusions than "hmm this doesn't feel right let's not do it", much less "hmm this doesn't feel right so let's prohibit it for everyone". If you misinterpret that as aggression or confrontationalism, then I can only advise you to get to know me better.
If you felt attacked because you count yourself as one of the people whose attitude I referred to as "stupidity", then I apologise, but this must mean that you agree that you "just assume that you "own" your comments by default, and complain about any form of "tinkering" even when it's perfectly legitimate if you thought about it for only a second". Surely you can't agree with me that any intelligent thinking being would find that kind of behaviour reasonable?
No one works with me to create a "better comment," but rather I write a comment so as to communicate what *I* am saying to someone else.
This sounds like you think that all of your comments are perfect and never need any form of improvement. This is hardly plausible: everyone sometimes makes a comment which inadvertantly ticks someone off (like I did, apparently; I would have liked for someone to be able to replace the word "stupidity" with "behaviour" or anything that runs a lower risk of offending someone); and everyone sometimes makes lesser mistakes (e.g. half of a comment is off-topic; a "not" was forgotten, or inserted where it was obviously not intended; accidentally referring to the wrong user or linking to the wrong diff when making an accusation, etc. etc. etc.). There needs to be a way for other people to correct these problems, or else (1) threads will too easily drift off-topic; (2) misunderstandings will exacerbate and get out of control; (3) flamewars and trolling will thrive.
In that sense, I *should* own comments, or there should be a large, loud disclaimer on every single page in the Talk namespace that comments may not belong to their professed authors.
No, but every single comment that was edited by someone else should bear a small but noticeable disclaimer to that effect. (I was going to insert some extra polemics here about something being obvious, but I've realised that this kind of bickering is not going to get us anywhere.)
Timwi