Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-31763506-20190504042018

I want to apologize for losing my temper in the discussion of last night's mini edit war on the Timeline article, both in the comments on the article and on Bron Handa's wall. My anger contributed little to the discussion and allowed Bron Handa to lead me by the nose off on arguments about side issues, to the detriment of clarity on the key issue.

I've also attempted one version of this post to have Wikia eat it on session timeout. I've taken the time to review Bron Handa's past contributions thinking I may have been being unfair to him, and I've frankly had my disgust with his behavior reinforced.

Let me start by making it absolutely clear why I thought Bron Handa's edit needed to be reverted pending admin review. I did it after I found this comment from by Lostone2 from December in Decanter's discussion regarding the reversion of Bron Handa's last major edit to the Races page:

Lostone2 said: I think that there is no point in splitting this page in several pages. I'm sorry that I haven't seen it before, but I was convinced that it was closed matter.

(Bron Handa) wanted to impose his/her criteria by creating several new pages. That is not how the things are done. When you want to make a big change like that, you open a conversation and talk with other wiki editors. I hope that he won't do something like this again.

OK, now the major portion of Bron Handa's edit to the Timeline page was to add links to the various pages he has made on individual races. The CLEAR intention here is to make an end run around the admin team and the other editors' express instructions not to break up the races page by systematically redirecting links on other articles to his individual race articles, canonizing his new articles de facto. This was such an egregious act of bad faith on his part that I felt it merited an immediate action to make it clear to him that this behavior was unacceptable. Since he reverted the reversion before I could finish making the post on his wall explaining the reasons for this, I kind of lost my temper... and things degenerated from there.

Now, it would be nice if Bron Handa's actions could be chalked up to misguided enthusiasm for improving the wiki, but he's shown a repeated pattern of arrogance and dismissiveness to other editors' contributions, see for example his repeated insults to Argenten during the debate on page quotes. This makes it a bit difficult to palette his complaints about my not valuing the effort he put into the edit. Bron Handa has clear prescriptive ideas about what he thinks the wiki should look like (basically an infinite proliferation of pages, apparently). He thinks we should operate by Wikipedia rules despite being told repeatedly that we work through discussion and building consensus instead of the more decentralized model.

My hope is that Bron Handa can learn to work with the rest of the community and make a more substantive set of contributions, but I'm frankly not optimistic. I'm not an admin and I don't want to be but I think I've made it clear why I think his actions are unacceptable. What further action is taken regarding edits to the Timeline page or the various Race pages is not my decision.

Now, as to the secondary issue of multiple links per section in the Timeline page, this really is a "don't care" on my part. The duplicate links are an artifact my adding those links semi-programmatically. If Bron Handa wants to make another edit removing just the duplicate links, he can go nuts as far as I'm concerned. I'd prefer to have guidance from the community on whether this is a necessary stylistic change. I've also made it clear to Bron Handa that I can wipe out these links almost instantly should the determination be that this should be done, so his energy would be better directed elsewhere.

I'd suggest procuring a copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People".  