Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfukar | Hacker News Reader

  If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue.

I guess he missed all the subtle indicators people left all over the place saying "Christopher, we are upset".

View on HN

No, my understanding was that a small, but vocal, special interest group was upset for nominating their favorite programming language. The vast majority of angry people seemed unable to come up with a rational reason for saving the article. The vast majority of calm people seemed to agree with the deletions, and agreed with me for labeling the others as a small-but-vocal-minority. If you felt you were doing something right and no one who thought you were wrong had a convincing case (as convincing as "nazi dickwad deletionist we're gonna e-mail your professor" is), wouldn't you try to push through the intimidation? It wasn't until the wider reddit and HN communities caught on that I understood that it wasn't an annoyed minority, yet I would have caught on earlier if someone had actually tried to reason with me (and maybe brought up the citation argument).

I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts.

> I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts.

At least you're getting voted up, which should help. It's an anti-spam measure... also, try clicking on the 'link' of something you want to reply to. If there's too much back and forth in a thread, it'll hide the 'reply' button in an attempt to slow down conversation, but obviously this is a bit of a special case.

For what it's worth, the stuff that passes for discussion on the AfD pages makes me wonder if something like the Scholarpedia model for articles is the better way of doing things.

Much of the stuff that passes for discussion on some of the more contentious pages makes me wonder about the whole process. See Talk:Danah_Boyd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Danah_Boyd) for one of the cases that made me realize that the editor process is broken.

Your understanding is wrong. It is this attitude of yours, that of ascribing fictional motives to those who criticized you, and the failure to comprehend the impact of your actions, that had a role to play in precipitating the outrage in the first place. I am no fan or user of any of the language that you helped delete. But that does not mean I would be ok with those deletions. See my other comments for an elaboration. I know enough that important knowledge also exists as folklore and it is important to preserve them on Wikipedia, precisely because they are not represented adequately elsewhere.

You are clearly disingenuous. You complained about: if only people had told you that you were doing wrong. People did, and you came up with snarks and smileys and gratuitously appointed yourself the position of a judge that decides which citations had impact and which did not. And when it went out of hand, you played the victim and you changed your excuse to 'if only _more_ people did, more reasonably etc. etc'.

``I only recommended a deletion, did not delete it myself``, is another exhibition of dis ingenuousness and irresponsibility. Same for the shuttling between, "I am sorry" and, ``I was right in every case``. (Things between `` `` aren't actual quotes)

I believe you are an adult, everybody expects adults to possess some degree of understanding of what is being told to them and act and apply rules with ownership and responsibility. What is specifically galling is that when push came to a shove you took up the excuse that notably rules are broken. But, earlier, had no problems argumentatively enforcing them blindly. No one had a gun to your head to do whatever you went about doing, you went about doing it anyway and then hid behind a straw-man.

Nobody has the time an energy to, as you indicate, to reason with someone at length. Especially when the other person is being unreasonably pedantic and obnoxious. Most people have a real job and more important things to do.

Edit: @runjake your point well taken and upped.

A wise man once said "Do not feed the troll."

Edit: before down-arrowing me, you may want to examine the situation. It's pretty apparent this guy has an agenda.

Everyone who comments on an AfD "judges" something. It was my opinion that there were not enough citations, and I was open to the views of others. When others do not give their views, or when their views are so clouded by their rage that they cannot effectively argue their point, then yes, I become the sole person who is judging.

I don't ever remember saying that the notability rules were broken. However, if others think that they are, I can respect their opinions. Likewise, I don't think I slithered out when push came to shove. Actually, when push came to shove, I continued what I was doing with the understanding that the naysayers were a special interest group with an agenda (wasn't this my previous post...?) However, I did say I would stop and spent a good deal of time apologizing here when it was clear that my understanding was false. How is this not taking responsibility for my actions?

Yes, people told me that I was wrong. But at the risk of repeating myself, they did not give me any reason to believe that they were aligned with the goals of Wikipedia, and others more experienced with Wikipedia assured me that they were not in fact aligned with said goals. I was willing to cooperate with anyone who took any effort to communicate with me: for instance, the first message I received on my talk page was asking why I put a notability tag on his article. He said it was notable, and provided a reference. I thanked him and removed the tag.

I don't know why you are so sure that I am acting in bad faith. If my intent was to troll Wikipedia, I wouldn't have used my real name.

You were interfering with the results and efforts of others. Surely, it isn't hard to understand that such interference is one of the few things guaranteed to antagonize people. Insisting that they should hold a coherent argument, after your provocation, is very unfair. Most people understand these things intuitively, so I would only point out your own blindness in certain aspects of social relations.

There have been many criticisms being leveled at your actions, but most of them—some correct, some incorrect—aren't important. Nor do your responses so far reveal any deep reflection of all that has transpired. The important point that people have been trying to articulate is this: Even though you were faced with mixed signals, rather than proceed with caution and try to understand the situation more fully (e.g., by engaging in discussion and building rapport), instead you plowed ahead with your own little project that would alter a common, shared space.

Wisdom and being right are different. It is wise to tread lightly. We will all learn, or re-learn, these things, at some juncture. Meanwhile, best wishes and happy Valentine's.

Sincerely,

A fellow grad student at Princeton

P.S. So, is it awesome working for an advisor who is a fan of Civ?

I'm honestly curious as to your motivation; what made you think that nominating Alice ML and Nemerle for deletion would make the world a better place? Do you think those articles existing made it harder to find other more useful content? Do you think they were unreasonable attempts by fans of the languages to use Wikipedia for self-promotion? Regardless of the letter of the policy, what made you think this was a good thing to do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com