[WikiEN-l] Tannin, it seems, has changed lots of articles

[Stan Shebs]

Tony Wilson wrote:

>
>Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only
>I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new
>material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working
>conditions.
>
Nobody is denying your productivity, but disagreeing with you
hardly qualifies as an "attack" - it's just a disagreement,
one among the many that are inevitable in a large group of
people with disparate opinions. If you're mistaken in your
position, then changing lots of articles is not making them
better, it's making them worse, so it should always be a fair
question to ask about the authority justifying those changes,
just as we do for history, and higher taxa, and other tricky
subjects. As I'm sure you know, part of scholarly discourse is
identifying points of contention and talking about the evidence
for and against, and outside of the bird arena, which is known
to be a special case, I have yet to see anything that requires
wholesale capitalization of species' common names.  We're having
good discussion on the naming conventions page though, and I
hope that will continue until we have a solid result.

I don't much care about the outcome either way, but
without a convention based on authority so great that
no rational person would ever dare challenge, the argument
is going to come up over and over.  In fact it will likely
get worse, if we succeed in attracting large number of new
editors and are not able to convince them all to go along
with the established conventions.

Stan