User talk:Daniel C. Boyer/Archive 3

"The only reason it even exists is because Daniel Boyer himself created it."

What? Didn't you read my history? Lots of users have redirects from the article namespace to the user namespace. Apparently once upon a time the user namespace didn't exist, so that's probably why in this case. It was me who changed it from an unremarkable redirect, to a real article. My reasons were as follows.

Articles about his works existed at that stage. I'm pretty sure they'd been listed on VFD, but the consensus was to keep them. Those articles linked to Daniel C. Boyer, which at that stage was just a redirect. I thought that was a bizarre sitation, and that if his works were allowed clearly he should be too. I researched Daniel's importance, and decided for myself that he was important enough to be included. I made a case (now recorded in /Archive 1), and publicised my intentions on Village pump. Since this was only a simple editorial decision on my part, you could say that I was being extremely timid in asking everyone if it's okay. Very un-wiki of me. There wasn't much interest, so I did it. A while later, Anthere came asking about including Daniel on the French wiki. A few more people said they were fine with inclusion, so it seemed to me that I'd probably done the right thing.

Then it became clear that Daniel had been inserting his name and works into random articles. After this was pointed out and publicised by Daniel Quinlan, community opinion on this issue went from indifference or acceptance to what we see now -- a significant number of editors hell-bent on the destruction of anything Boyer-related. Maybe I'm confusing correlation with cause, or maybe what I suspect is true: Wikipedians can be a vindictive bunch.

-- Tim Starling 07:57, Jul 31, 2003 (UTC)

Or they may be keen on keeping the encyclopedia intact when it becomes obvious that some Wikipedians edit it in a way that is blatantly contrary to its principles. Yes there has been some over-reacting (like my comments on Wikipedia:Current disputes over articles). That doesn't change the facts, though.

I'm moving some related discussion from the village pump to this page to keep things in one place. Kosebamse 10:08, 31 Jul 2003 (UTC)

• user:/bio -> Talk:Daniel C. Boyer/move to user:

• suggestion of seperate namespace/project -> Talk:Daniel C. Boyer/move to user: