Talk:Kim Jong Il/Archive 3

message: Isn't it typical of Stalinists to want to try to rewrite history?  The deletion by 172 of my comments from this page is just an example of that.  It is completely unacceptable for other users to delete a user's comments from Talk pages, but that doesn't stop 172 from behaving that way.  RickK | Talk 18:45, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Uh-huh. Well, that has all the maturity of "Mommy, he did it to me first!" Stan 06:24, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Stan, I will conduct my political disputes as I see fit. Adam 06:54, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Stalinist behavior

message: The curious thing to me is that both Adam and 172 purport to be professionals, yet repeatedly say and do unprofessional things. WPers sometimes wish for involvement by more professionals, but after seeing these two go at it, I really wonder about the standard of behavior in history departments these days. Stan 20:31, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: 172 also said on the record that "Adam and I differ on how we'd like to bring an end to this regime." That doesn't sound like an apologist for the DPRK regime. --Wik 09:43, Mar 28, 2004 (UTC)
I'd really appreciate help from you and other users. Is there a way to force Adam to quit harassing people (I'm not his only target)? He gets off on going after people, and will not stop out of consideration to other users who want to write an encyclopedia rather than wage blood-feuds. If I don't have to be put in the position of having to defend myself from a smear campaign, the nonsense on this talk page will stop. 172 07:13, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

text: FUD from Adam. 172 07:51, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, you two could agree to mediation. If not, there's always the Arbitration Committee to decide who's in-bounds and who's out-of-bounds. Stan 14:06, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Response to Stan

message: Although I bet that I'm going to hear some more bullshit about this, I reverted the recent edits by User:Barbara Shack. She's made writing about these reports a pet project of hers on WP, but is very sloopy when it comes to noting and analyzing the sources. It's hard to be sure about anything when you're dealing with a country that, e.g., raises a 105-story hotel complex, but leaves it empty since completing work in '91 (Pyongyang isn't one of the world's more bustling tourist destinations). Any news, good or bad, from the DPRK is suspect. 172 00:57, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep, the WP software should not allow reversion of an edit by a registered user without the prior agreement of the user - too easy to just revert changes without looking at them. 172 reverted a grammar fix by Barbara for instance, Everyking had to put it back. And of course the irony of saying "Any news, good or bad, from the DPRK is suspect" and yet filling this article with that very same suspect material... Stan 05:14, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: I think that you're overreacting a bit. If you disagree with a change, you can post a note on the talk page. It only takes seconds to restore an earlier version. Every article is indefinitely a work in progress and open for discussion. It's not like I edited the article minutes before a publication deadline. 172 06:09, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: I agree with Adam. WP would be left about as productive as a North Korean collective farm if Stan's idea were tried out.  172 06:09, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: "If you disagree with a change, you can post a note on the talk page" - how about doing that before reverting somebody, rather than after. Reverting without prior discussion is a completely cowardly practice. For anon vandalism, sure, I do that kind of reversion every day, but for good-faith edits by registered users, reversion is usually used as a way to avoid discussion, hoping that the person won't notice the reversion, goes away, whatever. If the person is a crackpot, prove they're crackpots via the talk page, get agreement from other editors about how to edit the page, and then move the crackpot material to a part of the article entited "Crackpot Beliefs". If this seems like a lot of trouble, well, topics that attract crackpots are going to do so repeatedly forever, so it's going to be more sustainable to provide a bounded area where the strange ideas can be aired, ringed with caveats for the average reader who wishes to enter. (I can't believe this is too subtle of a concept for people to have figured out on their own...) Stan 16:15, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The edit to the article and the note on the talk page were completed within minutes of each other. Since there wasn't an ongoing edit war, it's no big deal that the note on the talk page came a minute or two after the edit to the article, rather than the other way around. If you have a problem with the substance of the article after the revert, please state it already. 172 22:23, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know about you, but to me, "discussion" means more than a note on the talk page, irrespective of whether it's posted three microseconds before or after the revert. For instance, the thing you reverted was a link to a whole article; that article has been worked on by a number of people, it has documentation (more than than in some of your articles in fact), and it is linked to from several other places. So if the content is as problematic as you're saying, delinking it from one article is not a solution to the problem; it should be delinked from everywhere, put on VfD, etc. I don't have an opinion on the content itself, I just object to the cowardly approach taken towards dealing with another editor. Stan 23:07, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: But there isn't a discussion. Among the users who've been using the talk page, Adam is okay with the changes, Wally's stance is unclear, your stance is unclear, and I still favor my changes. I'm up for discussion, but I cannot be faulted for not being able to find someone with whom to discuss these changes in the first place. IMO, it seems like you're just trying to find any excuse to attack me. 172 23:16, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, how about Barbara Stack for openers? She has a talk page, you know. If this article is not on her watchlist, she may still be unaware that her addition was deleted. I was on WP for several months before I discovered that people were deleting some of my work "behind my back" because I wasn't watching some pages. Stan 04:57, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My stance is a) I wanted to make a single edit, which I did, and get some substantive critique on it, which I did (after a fashion and 27 words of argument here for every one in the change) and b) I want the editing of this article to be open to everyone who might have something to contribute.  You keep talking about all these pages in your watch list that you wrote and are so proud of and whatever - good job, but they're not YOUR pages.  They're OUR pages, EVERYONE'S pages.  You shouldn't just troll around whatever you've written defensively shunting off whatever edits are made simply because they contravene your overarching wisdom and knowledge.  If you don't have time to explain errors to people who make them in bona fide edits rather than just reverting them, then maybe you're doing and investing too much in your own work.  Wally 18:38, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well Wally, perhaps I will drop by Unification of Sweden (a subject about which I know nothing) sometime and make a lot of ungammatical, ill-informed and tendentious edits, and do that for, say, five days running, and see how you like it. I'm prepared to bet that by day 3 you'll be unceremoniously reverting me just as I do at articles I have written. Adam 04:19, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You'd do better to troll at assassin, Leo Ryan or Siege of Vienna - those are and have been my major projects.  Unification was an article of someone else's I cleaned up, thank you very much.  And forgive me if I say that it's a little said to be so compulsively-attached to one's own work; almost a sort of paranoid narcissism.  I don't check articles I've written constantly to make sure they're not changed against my liking; if it's a good change, it stays, regardless of my feeling, and I check back occasionally to see how they are.  But deliberately scaring others away just so you'll have the sandbox to yourself is...well, that's something else.  In the words of Judge Judy, don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining. Wally 00:23, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: In all fairness to Adam, I think that he means that he's concerned with maintaining the quality of articles that he's capable of monitoring. A large share, if not the vast majority of regular users keep tabs on their watchlist for that reason.  172 06:07, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: I tend to agree with that. This is probably the standard practice among (a) users who tend to be writers first and copyeditors second (b) users who tend to focus on the history and politics articles (c) users who tend to rely on the watchlist feature in order to chose the articles on which they're working. It's my standard practice, and I'm not embarrassed to admit that either. We deal with a different set of difficulties from the users who tend to spend more time on administrative and maintenance matters and copyediting (i.e. the users who tend to be the biggest "civility" pushers). On that note, although Adam's been pissing me off lately, I have to commend his efforts to maintain some semblance of encyclopedic standards on the Greek and Polish articles for the past few weeks, which doesn't seem to be the path of least resistance. There's just so much bullshit! IMO, editors are a way to solve these problems, not restricting our access to editing the pages. 172 04:30, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: Well, there are a number of credible web sites that include that info, and inclusion of information has to take precedence over what looks ideal, so I think it should be restored. Everyking 01:55, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Off-topic debate about process issues

message: "At this time Kim assumed the title "Dear Leader" and the government began building a personality cult around him patterned after that of his father, the "Great Leader." Kim Jong-il was regularly hailed by the media as the "peerless leader" and "the great successor to the revolutionary cause." He emerged as the most powerful figure behind his father in the DPRK."
What source do we have for these media quotes, and why aren't they under our citations?
Also, since we only have a single external link available, is it possible it could be, I dunno, in English? :P  I've added (or am about to) a CNN profile of Kim to try to provide something a) substantive and b) readable for English speakers, but we should look into the rest.  For now, however, the Korean website is bye-bye. Wally 06:21, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about sourcing