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Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Deirdre_McCloskey#Bailey_...

You gave up pretty quickly! The last response you got was basically: "I agree that the Bailey incident can be expanded and her signature on the Harper letter is worth mentioning, but this has to be written in a neutral way.[...]"

Which is as close to "just tidy it up and you're good" as you're going to get, to be frank. Especially seeing earlier contention on the same topic.

I wonder which editor you thought was on a moral crusade. The last times the topic was touched were in 2007 and 2017, and your edit was in 2020. It's somewhat unlikely that you'd encounter the same editors as back then to begin with, and as far as I can tell the only interaction you had on-wiki was one response to you, which you didn't reply to.

Am I missing something?

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If I'm seeing correctly, they did tidy it up and resubmit it - where it was then removed (I don't quite understand why - perhaps because they didn't reply to the talk saying so?).

The talk page was later. The text still needed a bunch of tidying. Could have asked the other editor to help out!

That said, that looks like quite the controversy. Adding that kind of thing to wikipedia is tricky because it can be hard to represent in a neutral way. Same sequence of events could have happened to me, or anyone else. Fortunately other editors are there to help, but you do need to talk with them.

(edit) Basically Baryphonic started out fine. Discussing on the talk page was the next logical step, after which you can edit the text to fix the issues. Often this kind of change takes several iterations to iron out the problems.

Ah good catch, I missed that. I agree that they probably could have gone through WP:BRD and gotten this into the article.

The article I linked in my original comment is different though and the user Valjean maintains a number of pages that they revert edits from and don't really engage in BRD in good faith.

Would you like to look at a particular situation in detail with me?

Without knowing which 'particular situation' you're talking about, I can just save your confusion.

There are articles in Wikipedia which will _always_ convey a certain perspective. Edits to them will always be reverted. The reverters will not engage with the audit process. The senior staff will not challenge those reverters. The procedure to handle this situation will not work. Arguments will be made that make literally no sense and will yet be accepted. If you persist in trying to make those changes your account will be banned on spurious grounds.

Well, that's not supposed to happen, obviously, not in the way you put it anyway.

But definitely give me an article/situation on Wikipedia where you feel that this is the case, and I'll take a look with you. Diffs appreciated!

The user whimsicalism is probably more interested in discussing this, I'd take it up with them.

I sense that this conversation will lead to a great deal of wordy justifications for the unjustifiable. I've already said that's part of the dissuasion process, I'm not interested in participating in it.

These discussions were already had at great length on reddit r/wikiinaction and resulted only in the subreddit being castrated.

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