At 09:36 AM 6/6/2004 +0000, Abe Sokolov wrote:
Bryan Derksen:
Speaking of rudeness, aside from berating me on the mailing list due to one single disagreement, you came out of nowhere on [[Talk:Origins of the American Civil War]] dismissing the article division as "ugly" and "fragile," proclaiming that you were going to "better organize" [the article] while offering no specifics.
I "came out of nowhere" because I'd been randomly browsing around and had just come across it for the first time; the readership of pages on Wikipedia is not unchanging and new arrivals like that happen all the time. I offered no specifics because I hadn't worked them out yet when I first started posting on talk:. I was planning to work the specifics out _collaboratively_ because I didn't want to step on anyones' toes if I could help it. However, new arrival at that page or not, I have just as much right to edit that article as you do. I was simply trying to be polite by discussing it first.
Furthermore, your desire to "create better page titles" made no sense at all. You failed to understand that these weren't four separate articles but rather a single article consisting of four pages.
I fully understood that, and I explained in talk: that I simply didn't think it was a good idea to leave the page like that. Wikipedia is not paper and I don't believe that one should have to "turn pages" like that if it really is a single article.
My opinion that this is a bad way of organizing the page is just as well thought out as your opinion that it isn't. Don't assume that I disagree with you simply because you don't think I understand the issue as well as you do.
Wanting you to be aware of the reasons for which a number of users had opposed the kind of division that you were proposing (a New Imperialism-style division/series) isn't rude. Instead, making sure that everyone's on the same page-- what I was attempting to do-- is usually considered helpful.
You yourself later admitted that you came across as "curmudgeonly" in our discussion. You also threatened edit wars on two occasions - the first time by implication, saying I should avoid "meaningless edit wars" and the second time explicitly telling me I would "provoke an edit war" if I went ahead. I did _not_ consider your input to be particularly helpful, it came across more as an obstinate insistence that you knew best for this page and would brook no compromise. In contrast Mav, whom you included in your list of people who supported the way the article was split up, seemed willing to at least hear me out on my objections (hope you don't mind me invoking your name like that, Mav).
I'm not going to discuss the details of the page itself any further here, this is the mailing list and not the relevant talk: page. Go there if you want to continue discussing it.
But considering the lynch mob atmosphere of this mailing list, I suppose that writing this article is more evidence in favor of a ban, right?
This isn't about banning you. If I was into that sort of thing I would have made more of a ruckus when you moved the in-progress discussion into /Archive 2 and protected it, which even then seemed to me like a deliberate attempt to quash further debate. I'm simply pointing out that I had a similar experience to Geoff's, and came to a similar conclusion; you don't seem to work well in the Wikipedia environment collaborating with people who disagree with you, you seem to go on the attack instead.