Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Kender/freed

Response from Freederick

I am not sure whether it is appropriate to include my statement here, as I am not included in the list of participants. Please feel free to remove this response if it is out of line. I would like to be included as a participant, if possible; what stopped me is that I was not involved at all in the Kender article or its discussion. My involvement with the current dispute and Gavin took place in other articles, such as Rod of Seven Parts, Magocracy, Slaad and others, mostly on their AfD pages. I also took part in the RfC discussion about Gavin. Having said that, here's my angle:

• The principles that I respect the most are Verifiability and No Original Research. These are what make Wikipedia a source of useful encyclopedic information, rather than a forum for personal opinions. I am less respectful of Notability, for the following reason: as the coverage of Wikipedia expands, we are bound to see the notability guideline gradually relax as progressively less notable information is included. In other words, Wikipedia is not paper; it can afford a broader coverage than classical encyclopedias with their limited capacity. Still, to preserve its utility, Wikipedia must remain restricted to reliable, i.e. verifiable information. Thus Verifiability and NOR are, and shall remain, essential; while Notability is relative.
• I have been a RPG player and gamemaster in the past. While at present semi-retired in this capacity, I still follow the field with interest, and Wikipedia has been a valuable encyclopedic resource to me in that regard. I became involved in the current dispute when I noticed that some of the articles I consulted were subject to heated discussion and machine-gun AfD onslaught. I investigated, found that some editors names were constantly resurfacing in the context of this dispute, and became involved myself.
• I am willing to accept mergers of the shorter and less-important RPG articles into lists and larger parent articles. I am willing and eager to see cruft cleaned up, with an axe if need be. I am not willing to put up with gun-to-the-head tactics of Gavin, especially in view of the fact that he is not doing any improvement work himself. Improving these articles takes time and loving effort from many conscientious editors. It should not be done under this sort of aggressive pressure.
• Gavin is sincere in his efforts, objective in his complaints, and remains civil under pressure. On the other hand, he is unremittingly antagonistic, and his numerous assembly-line-style contributions are restricted to tagging and criticism, often ill-informed to boot. If he starts doing constructive work on improving these articles, rather than just shooting them down wholesale, I'll be honored to work with him.
• As I am a RPG player myself, I find it difficult to disentangle in-universe content from an external view.
• The most pressing need in handling these articles is to develop an RPG-specific ruleset on which topics warrant standalone articles, and which ones do not. At present there are some unsourced stubs that would be best included as a section or mention in broader articles; on the other hand some topics deserve to be more developed. The editors are frequently enthusiasts who write on idiosyncratically chosen topics. It would help their effort if there were project guidelines on when to write a separate article, when to make a list, and when to merge.

My best regards to Gavin and everyone else involved. Freederick (talk) 16:19, 10 May 2008 (UTC)