[WikiEN-l] RE: partisan wrangling on wikipedia

Mon Feb 3 05:44:46 UTC 2003

I'm on the verge of following Tom's lead.  What's the point of trying to even try, when people like Lir/Vera are allowed back without warning and continue to slash their way through the 'pedia with no one even bothering to let us know that they were responsible for allowing them back in, and what their rationale was.
Zoe
 Tom Parmenter <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:|From: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
|Cc: 
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2003 22:18:58 -0800
|
|mav writes:
|>No! You are reading too much into my words. You never said that it is 
|>possible for us to keep from bickering and wrangling so my above
|statement 
|>was not directed at you but at Wikipedia skeptics in general who /do/
|say 
|>exactly that (and then fault us for not accomplishing this artificial
|ideal). 
|
|Well, my point was that it seems wikipedia could be more collegial. 
|Some conflict is to be expected, yes, but I rather suspect some people
|look forward to it when it comes. Some people live for it, some
|merely tolerate it, some people are bothered by it and avoid it. I'm
|formerly of class 1 (horrible arrogant troll I was 5 years ago),
|recently of class 2, moving towards class 3. I guess this is my
|problem, not everyone else's, except I wonder how many people really
|_enjoy_ acrimony--fewer than 12 on the 'pedia, I imagine, probably
|fewer than six, and I wonder how many of the other several hundred
|active contributors truly are put off by it. Those kind of people
|tend to be quieter about it until they've had enough, and then they
|leave, with or without explanation. I think Julie was one of those
|people; and losing her was a considerable loss.

I don't think I'm a skeptic, I believe in NPOV, and I believe it can
be achieved, but I'm worn out. I am going to join class 3 and avoid
all conflict. A few pointed questions and an errant indentation of a
talk page comment have earned me a bitter enemy, neither a nice
person, nor an interesting one. Asking, and then trying to explain,
what was new about [[new imperialism]] led to weeks of fussing and
fighting about a topic that was peripheral to me. I helped, but
wouldn't an article on ''[[Bleak House]]'' or ''[[The Way We Live
Now]]'' have been a better expenditure of my time?

I just don't have any interest in struggling with anyone anymore. A
few tussles here and there (and yes, wisecracks and smarty-pants
remarks) were fun, but from now on when people have no commitment to
anything but conflict, they're going to have to conflict with someone
else. There aren't many of them. I hope they lose, but I'm out of
bullets.

I'm going to concentrate on novelists and pop music and jazz and
language and and copy editing and other odds and ends where I have
some scraps of knowledge and just let the article on [[Richard
Wagner]] go to hell without my protest and [[remote viewing]] can
claim that "viewers" have seen Pontius Pilate's signature on Jesus's
death warrant and I won't say a word.

By saying that I am going to join class 3 and avoid all conflict, I am
saying that I am surrendering the field to the anti-NPOV forces. I
don't know that I have distinguished myself in this area, but I have
tried. I'm not going to try any more. In the meantime, if people
want to write blatant and stupid articles, I hope someone else will
stop them.

I'll be off bolding alternate forms of article titles, putting song
titles in quotes and album titles in italics and writing little
articles about Trollope and Dickens and Pinetop Perkins, sincerely
hoping that none of the troubling people will bother to track me down
there. But each time they do track me down, I'm dropping out of the
topic. And, if I drop out of enough topics, if even [[punctuation]]
and [[English plurals]] start drawing the energy vampires, then I
guess I'll just be gone for good. 

I'll ask my questions where they have a chance of being answered
civilly. The new person writing articles about [[rodeo]] took my
skeptical but honest questions about [[bareback bronc]], [[saddle
bronc]] and [[bull riding]] in hand and just plain answered them,
never bothering to accuse me of being a PETA member or a disgruntled
cowboy failure.

Someone just popped in to [[Talk:Mumia Abu Jamal]] to compliment us on
the achievement of NPOV. We worked on that one back in August. It
seems decades ago. I just don't think it would have happened that way
now and I'm fearful of even mentioning it, but since I am taking it
off my watchlist, maybe I won't hear of any bad things happening to
it.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88 

PS - I just remembered I still have a little backlog on the [[Bombing
of Dresden in World War II]] and [[David Irving]] that I promised to
get off my chest, but even there, one peep of protest and I'm out.
And then, no more like it. See you in [[knot]]s.

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