Several days ago I deleted a large portion of farqwart’s wu’s. This was not a personal attack. They were all entries from The Devil’s Dictionary that had been posted under the individual entries name. Saige had already comprehensively copied the Devil’s Dictionary, and I could see no reason to maintain identical duplicate entries in different places. Attempts to reason with farqwart were met first with silence and then later with the public posting of my /msg’s to him on his homenode, along with analysis of my poor spelling and confused intentions. He was less than cooperative and his attitude suggested he was unwilling to compromise.
I’ve never been too fond of unoriginal material on E2, but I can see the value in keeping The Devil’s Dictionary as most of it is amusing and it is a historical document that opens a window onto the attitudes and opinions of a different era. As a bonus, it’s also public domain, relieving us of the concern of copyright. Unfortunately for some users, like farqwart, and thecarp, it has already been noded.
Two years ago Saige copied the entire text of The Devils Dictionary and organized the entries in large nodes, by alphabet, so as to reduce the NFN potential. This was a good thing. Some noders had already completed a few individual entries as whim prompted them, but it was Saige who completed the project first. Thusly, hers shall remain, while the others are removed. As it turns out, and as erevapisces so passionately pointed out, there are a large number of these individual entries that I was unaware of.
Despite claims to the contrary, it was never my intent to single out farqwart or any other noder and I voted on none of them, either + or -, before marking them for destruction. Neither am I drunk on my very small amount of power, nor am I deleting them because I find the material offensive. It was simply a matter of attention, I had never seen these individual entries before. Had I noticed them earlier I would have done the same thing, even before I was granted Admin status.
As for the claims that the individual wu’s are better because they included integrating links, well, that’s a good point and I asked Saige to include links in her definitions. She has agreed to do so.
I have already removed the entries under A, and it took me almost an hour and a half. Like I said, there are a lot of these, alot more than I anticpated. Some help from the editors and other Gods would be appreciated. Please note on the following if you will assist.