Mostly in defence of 172 - WikiEN-l

16 Jan 2003

I'm going to confine these remarks to the areas where I have a reasonable amount of
experience of interacting with 172, and some expertise of my own - in other words,
I'll discuss 172's 
contribution to articles dealing with colonial history in the late 19th and early 20th
Centuries. (I have not followed developments in the articles on modern China and the USSR
at all closely, nor am I 
especially well-versed in those subjects, so on those I'll say nothing.)

User 172 seems to have the ability to arouse great passion. I think it's fair to
summarise the charges against him as:

1: Left-wing bias
2: Aggressive defence of his contributions, in particular instant reversion without
comment to the "authorised version"
3: Failure to work co-operatively with others
4: Insisting on cross-posting more-or-less the same text to a number of related articles.

And I think it's also fair to add that a great deal of the venom 172 attracts is not
simply because of the points above, but because:

1: He is all too often abrupt and dismissive of those who take a contrary view.
2: His prose is very difficult to edit. It is dense, convoluted, and far from easy
reading. Short of wholesale slashing, editing 172's work is not for the
faint-hearted.
3: His writing is littered with the jargon of Marxian political economy. Readers
unfamiliar with sociology or political economy can all too easily confuse many of the
common technical terms, which 
have specific, value-neutral  meanings, with the more familiar terms of nakedly
value-laden Leninist tracts (which were quite well-used until recently). The untrained
reader thus is prone to jump to 
the conclusion that 172 is a raving communist.

These factors are multiplied because they work in combination. One tends to find a
statement that has a questionable POV but feel reluctant to edit it because it is embedded
in dense, complex, 
and technical prose, and further reluctant because one fears an edit war.

On the other hand. 172 has a great deal of expertise in certain fields. On the development
of European colonialism, for example, I think I'm safe in saying that I am not alone
in having developed 
considerable respect for his knowledge. (See Talk:New Imperialism for evidence of my
assertion here.) He writes in great detail, and on dauntingly difficult subjects. Although
I firmly believe that 
172's longer contributions need careful copy editing and peer review before they are
set in concrete, they make an excellent foundation for readable, fact-filled articles of
real scholarship. For an 
example of this, wade through the most recent two talk pages in New Imperialism. There you
will see that Ortolan88, Slrubenstein and I made a good start on the task of making the
article neutral 
in tone and accessible to the general reader without losing accuracy or too much detail.
172 was, on the whole, co-operative with us, and the article began to improve a great
deal. It was only 
when the far more disruptive and unreasonable Vera Cruz stepped in with (as another
contributor complained) the "death of a thousand cuts" that Ortolan88 gave up in
disgust. I perservered for a 
little longer before doing likewise, and I think even SLR has become discouraged now.  

We can work with 172. We can't work with the mindless chaos of a Vera Cruz edit war. 
Get rid of that particular disruptive influence and SLR or I (or more likely both of us
working together) will 
lick "New Imperialisim" into shape inside a week, and unless I miss my guess, we
will do it with the help and co-operation of 172.  

(I should add, just in case the point isn't clear from my comments above, that without
172's solid foundation of detailed content, the eventual article would be weaker.)

172 *can* be reasoned with. He and I engaged in a moderately protracted edit war in
History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (It's worth reviewing the history of
that page, and reading its 
talk page also.) Consider the following exchange from Talk:History of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. 

TANNIN: (as a PS to an extended and detailed defence of my point of view about the edit
war) The introduction of technical terms, especially terms from political economy which
have become 
loaded with emotive associations in the minds of most non-specialists, is something to
avoid except where absolutely essential. Just as writers on mathematics have learned the
hard way that 
littering texts for the general reader with mathematical formulae is a sure-fire shortcut
to eternal obscurity, so too must the historian be aware that many of his most useful
terms are counter-
productive in non-specialist contexts. In fact, it is worse for the historian than it is
for the mathematician: readers see a formula and just skip over it because they don't
understand it or don't want to 
stop and puzzle it out before continuing, but readers see text laced with terms like
"multinational", "capitalism", "accumulation of surpluses",
"inalienable", "commodities", and "bourgeois" and, 
unless the terms are used sparingly, and in a way that makes their technical meaning clear
(as opposed to their emotion-laden common meanings) they recoil in horror. Readers
don't understand 
mathemetician's technical expressions (their formulae). Readers *misunderstand*
political economists' technical expressions (words like those listed above) - which is
a good deal worse. 

172: I truly appreciate your suggestions. I will strive to improve my communication on the
grounds you listed. 

Now 172 *did* then take the opportunity to quote my comment in his own defence on various
user talk pages, and (in my view) made more of it than was actually there - I went so far
as to complain 
to him that he had quoted me out of context at one point - but I genuinely believe that he
has learned a little from that exchange (and from some other, broadly similar, ones, both
with me and with 
other contributors). He remains a prickly character but his prose is improving, and while
he is certainly not as easy to work with as some, he can be amenable to evidence and
reason. (As the 
history and talk of History of the Democratic Republic of the Congo shows.)

In summary, yes, 172 creates difficulties. But he also makes a very useful contribution to
Wikipedia, and is not impossible to work with. He has moderated his initial
anti-cooperative behaviour, and 
(I suspect) will learn to moderate it further as time goes by (not least in consequence of
this present controversy). 

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list(a)redhill.net.au