Ivan Krstic wrote:
No, the purpose of this was to test your reaction. You fell right for it exactly the way I expected: you picked up only on the emotional side of the paragraph (taking it as an insult)
Do you understand how conceited this makes you sound?
No, apparently not. But your reply shows the same thing about you that I was trying to demonstrate about Ryan. You, too, have not replied to what I said, and instead digressed into a treatise on the emotional/social effects of my tone.
You need to relax, and start spending less time writing borderline-offensive e-mail to people who are trying to reason constructively,
I'm disappointed that you (and others) find that I am not trying to reason constructively, because I am. I would rather consider your accusation of my lack of constructiveness "borderline offensive", but as I said before, this kind of bickering is not going to get us anywhere.
and more time thinking about what they're saying. I can tell you exactly why it *is* wrong: comments are not Wikipedia articles, even if you seem to be constantly confounding the two.
Everything you say in the rest of your posting was already said elsewhere in the thread. You seem to think that I don't understand it, but in fact I do, and you don't seem to understand my refutation of it. I am not contradicting any of the things you say (comments aren't like articles, comments are signed by a particular person, etc.etc.). All I'm saying is that this is a fallacy:
Comments [...] represent only that person's views, have no requirement of adherence to a NPOV, and that means that essentially none of the reasons that Wikipedia articles are editable by everyone apply to them.
It is the "and that means" that is wrong. It DOESN'T mean that. Or, more precisely, it doesn't mean that comments shouldn't be editable. This is a fallacy.
It is also a fallacy to state that we should do it like all other web-forums. It is not true that they would have changed if there was reason to do so, in the same way that encyclopedias haven't gone wiki long before Wikipedia.
Timwi