User talk:Eanschuessler
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I reverted this page to remove your contributions: we still have the right to edit earlier versions. If you wish to insist it is kept, for existing in the page history, I will delete the page and find a way to restore the article. Wikipedia is not a soapbox; and we will thank you not to use it as one. -- Jim Regan 20:28, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
I have also changed Ean Schuessler; your additions were not encyclopaedic. As I've gotten off to a bad start with my comments above, I'll try to rectify that. Your contributions are welcome, but please be aware that we have standards we wish to maintain. The most important of these is our NPOV policy. We have other standard practices (though I can't for the life of me track them down at the moment :) - we don't ask that you agree with them; we do ask that you follow them, or provide good reason not to, and help us to refine them.
If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page or how to format them visit our manual of style. Experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump.
If you wish to edit Ean Schuessler, perhaps you might use one of our existing biographies as a guideline.
I've just read the comment you left on my talk page; I'll address your comments here.
- "You are inviting further perfectly legal harassment from me."
As I said, if you wish, I can delete your modifications from the page history if you require this. I would rather not do this, as reinstating the rest of the version history is not currently practical; it would require some effort on my part to ensure that proper attribution is maintained, but I am prepared to do this, and I am sure many others are too.
- "What if I start continuously modifying this entry so that you have to keep an endless history with my changes?"
Then we will treat you as a vandal, and revert every contribution you make on sight; if you persist we will block your account. You are perfectly free to create another, but experience tells me that people will notice your editing patterns and habits: those accounts will be blocked too.
- "you would be abridging freedom of expression in the interest of enforcing a bad license."
Firstly, I agree that it is a bad licence, but this is a problem that is being addressed, slowly but surely. The important thing to me is the intention: we want Wikipedia to be free, and will find a way for it to properly be so. The GFDL was chosen, I think, out of trust in the Free Software Foundation, as a documentation licence that allowed documents to be shared in the same way that the GPL allows software to be.
That hasn't turned out to be true, but I think the consensus is that it's preferable for the FSF to fix the brain damages of their licence rather than try to track down every Wikipedia contributor to have a licence change (and even in that event, there doesn't seem to be any documentation specific licence without its own problems).
Wikipedia isn't about freedom of expression, it is a project to build an encyclopaedia, written from the Neutral Point of View. We do not allow people to express their own personal views in articles; we attribute views, try to balance the pros and cons of a subject, and only use that information for which we can provide verifiable references (which, by the way, is why I had to modify Ean Schuessler). Please don't take offence to the analogy, but it is similar to Debian in a way: Debian does not allow any random piece of software to be part of the distribution; there are guidelines and standards to be followed. I got most of the way through the new maintainer queue in Debian, and some day hope to finish the process: I don't fully agree with a few of Debian's decisions, but I was, would be, and am fully prepared to follow them to the best of my ability.
I don't think you can condemn us too quickly, though, for any action we take to avoid the use of the worst parts of a bad licence :)
- "This isn't about using Wikipedia as a soapbox. This is about Wikipedia selecting a bad license and a concerned citizen demonstrating weaknesses in it."
As I said, Wikipedia picked a bad licence out of a bad bunch--despite Debian's fondness for it, I don't think too many other people consider the GPL fit to be a licence for text. The Village Pump or the Mailing lists are the proper places to have a discussion like this. Of course, you are new to Wikipedia, and therefore it is unreasonable to expect you to know this.
(Oh, where I used "we", I should have said "my interpretation of our policy and intentions" etc. Others may correct me on some points, but I can only offer my own opinion).