[WikiEN-l] Bus Uncle

[John Lee]

On 6/7/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/7/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/6/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Why do I even have to explain this?  You're not newbies.
> >
> > Tony, I suspect you hold the record for managing to be right yet
> > pissing people off by the way you do it.  Would it hurt to try and get
> > things done a little less abrasively at times?  For one thing, pissing
> > people off tends to make them blind to the sense of your argument, and
> > since quite often your reasoning is actually good, this sounds
> > counter-productive.
>
> I don't think there is any legitimate reason to be pissed off here.  I
> correctly identified some serious problems in an article, correctly
> removed it from the list that is supposed to represent our best
> articles, correctly alerted about half the community, and correctly
> followed up by working to resolve the issues.
>
> And for a bonus, I educated some people on this mailing list in how it
> is possible, in a wiki, to do things quickly and without red tape.
>
> This is value for money, particularly as I don't demand remuneration.
> What's to complain about?


Welcome to the real world, where human beings don't calculate the costs and
benefits of actions and scream "OMG UNILATERAL ADMIN ABUSE" when you are
bold and perform a revertable action. As I said, there were non-abrasive
ways of handling the situation and accomplishing the same or almost the same
result. Even the way you word your messages helps; you may be right, but
hitting people over the head with a tone like "Haha, I'm right and you're
not! Why don't you realise this?" isn't helpful.

Johnleemk