Summary style (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken)
Abe Sokolov
abesokolov at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 8 09:43:43 UTC 2004
bryan.derksen at shaw.ca wrote:
"So it's not surprising that I would use a lot of "character flaw"-type
language and that my posting wouldn't be particularly constructive as far as
the debate over the article itself is concerned, since the subject I was
focusing on was (my opinion of) character."
I did not get a good first impression of your editing style based on my
experiences in that specific encounter either. You were utterly unengaged
with the narrative and the historical aspects of the article. You only
seemed concerned about shuffling around text, titles, series boxes, pages,
and the like. But did you stop to figure other whether you knew what you
were doing?
Perhaps I should've spent more time briefing you on all the complications
that would arise from your proposals instead of hoping that you'd figure
this out on your own after reviewing the talk page discussions and reading
the article. Still, do you expect everything to be spoon fed?
On that note, reconsider this point from an earlier posting:
"Notice that as the reader moves down the page, the narrative builds on
points already established in the text. Unless someone rewrote and
significantly expanded each section of the article, Bryan's proposals
would've left the individual components of the series superficial at best
and incoherent at worst."
To illustrate this (and the dangers of your impatient approach to
reorganizing articles on major historical topics), I copied and pasted onto
this e-mail below a portion text taken from the section "The internal
structure and character of the Republican Party." I noted in brackets all
the points that would be unclear if this section were to become a
self-standing article (like all sections, the prose of this particular
section was tailored to the placement of the section within the narrative).
Taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War_%283/4%29#The_internal_structure_and_character_of_the_Republican_Party
:
"As the Democrats were grappling with their own troubles [What troubles?],
radicals in the Republican party [Who are the "radicals?"] fought against
the idea of "non-extension" [What's "non-extension?"] and fought to keep the
focus on the issue of slavery in the West [What issue of slavery in the
West? What contention?], which allowed them to mobilize a great deal of
popular support [Why is this the case?], at the focal point of political
discourse. Chase [Who's Chase?] wrote Sumner [Who's Sumner?] that if the
conservatives succeeded [Who? Conservative relative to whom?], it might be
necessary to recreate the Free Soil party [What's the Free Soil Party?]. He
was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to
eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments [Why?].
As a caveat, it is important to note that the controversy over slavery in
the West was still not creating a fixation on the issue of slavery. Although
the old restraints on the sectional tensions were being eroded with the
rapid extension of mass politics and mass democracy in the North [How so?],
the perpetuation of conflict over the issue of slavery in the West still
required the efforts of certain Democrats in the South and radical
Republican politicians in the North [What efforts?]. They had to ensure that
the sectional conflict would remain at the center of the political debate.
William Seward [Again, who's Seward?], in fact, contemplated this potential
as far back as the 1840s, when the Democrats were the nation's majority
party, usually controlling Congress, the presidency, and many state offices.
At the time, the country's institutional structure and party system allowed
slaveholders to prevail in more and more of the nation's territories and to
garner a great deal of influence over national policy [Examples illustrating
this?]. With growing popular discontent with the unwillingness of many
Democratic leaders to take a stand against slavery [Taking what forms?], and
growing consciousness of the party's increasingly pro-Southern stance
[Pro-Southern in what ways?], Seward became convinced that the only way for
the party to counteract the Democrats' strong monopoly of the rhetoric of
democracy and equality was for the Whigs to embrace anti-slavery as a party
platform."
This should make it clear your proposals would require every single section
of the article to be rewritten, expanded, and recontextualized
significantly. (BTW, who's going to do that? I don't want to. I doubt that
Mav does; he wants less text-- not more text. Are you? If so, reorganization
comes with rewritingand expandingthe entire entry) This is not as easy as
cut/paste, designing new boxes, and moving pages.
bryan.derksen at shaw.ca wrote:
"But my main concern is still whether you plan to continue using the threat
of edit wars in that discussion. Apologies don't matter much if the basic
problem remains unresolved."
I'm not at all sorry about that comment. You're just taking it the wrong
way. Right now, I oppose your proposals just as much as you support them;
the threat of an edit war is always implicit whenever this is the case
between two editors. My only crime there might be speaking an esoteric
truth. Anyway, all I meant was be patient (thus, adding a note about why you
might want to be patient) and continue negotiating. This doesn't mean that
I'm not listening.
-172
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