User talk:DavidCBryant/Archive 3

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This is an archive page for User talk:DavidCBryant. Please do not alter it. dcb

Contents 1 Well-documented? 2 Free personal attack 3 WP:NPA warning 4 Please do not revert without discussion

[edit] Well-documented?

Hi David. How do you figure that this:

"According to statements by former Scientologist Jesse Prince, celebrities are secretly being given lucrative compensation for endorsing Scientology. Their Scientology auditing courses are provided free. These courses regularly cost up to $1,000 dollars per hour. According to Mr. Prince, John Travolta alone has had in excess of $100,000 of free services in compensation."

could possible be "well-documented" when it is the statement of a known liar (see the Florida judge) on a highly biased website. That is about as far from "well-documented" as you can get if by "well-documented" you mean anything that approaches WP:V and WP:RS. The fact that I previously managed to note that he is a known liar does not "balance it" either. Please consider my point and reconsider your edit. Thanks and good-night. --Justanother 05:37, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, you have your opinion, and I have mine. The article doesn't express an opinion about Mr. Prince's veracity. It just cites sources presenting two different, but prevalent, points of view. If you don't like what I did, change it. DavidCBryant 06:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I just hope that you are not extending an opinion on Scientology, whom opinion you are certainly entitled to, I just hope that you are not extending that opinion to whether a bit of poorly-supported POV from a single discredited source and only reported on a highly POV website belongs on wikipedia. You're not, are you? --Justanother 15:55, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Free personal attack

David, please refrain from personal attacks as you did in this edit summary by characterizing my concern and my polite request as "hysteria". I do not believe that I have seen you editing in Scientology before so you may not know my stand on personal attacks. With the exception of Mr. Feldspar, with which I have a long history of mutual disrespect, I take very swift action against personal attacks. As far as Mr. Feldspar, I think that he will respond if I demonstrate my intention to not continue the past pattern and, as we are equally "guilty", it would take very blatant activity on his part for me to take action against him. You on the other hand, are a different story. I assumed good faith on your part and I presented a position that I thought you might find compelling. You responded with a personal attack. Everyone get one free swing at me. That was yours. --Justanother 13:31, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

If you think that someone is "attacking" you when he characterizes your tone of voice as "hysteria", then you really don't understand the English language very well. Please calm down. Or report me to the Wiki-police. It's your call. Oh – the personal relative pronoun is "who", not "which". One ought to write "...with whom I have a long history ..." and not "... with which I have a long history ...". Were one so inclined, one might characterize your dehumanization of Antaeus Feldspar as a "personal attack". But that's not my style. DavidCBryant 14:21, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WP:NPA warning

Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy. Comment on content, not on contributors; personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Note that continued personal attacks may lead to blocks for disruption. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you.

From WP:NPA

Insulting or disparaging an editor is a personal attack regardless of the manner in which it is done.

David, you have escalated the disparaging remarks. The path you are taking does not lead anywhere happy. I suggest that you desist. --Justanother 15:26, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

That's funny! I have neither insulted nor disparaged you. I have simply noted your overly emotional tone of voice, I have asked you to calm down, and I have pointed out one among several grammatical errors in the increasingly shrill messages you are placing on my talk page. Please stop nagging at me, and let's both do something constructive. Have a great day! DavidCBryant 18:46, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I am all for that so how 'bout you stop characterizing my remarks in disparaging terms such as "hysteria", "overly emotional", "increasingly shrill", and "nagging". Would you please do that for me? Thanks. --Justanother 21:26, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please do not revert without discussion

Hi. You have a history of reverting edits rather than trying to improve them. Please study: Wikipedia:Resolving_disputes#Avoidance. Bo Jacoby 11:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC).

Actually, Bo, you have a history of consistently destroying the work of others. I did not revert your edit. I improved it by removing the extraneous and/or redundant portions.

Good writing is logically coherent. Good writing does not repeat itself. Improvement means making it better. I made it better. Ergo I improved it. DavidCBryant 12:13, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I am not aware of having destroyed the work of others, neither consistently nor occasionally. You may give examples if you find this argument important. Personally I do not find the argument important. Other people behaving badly does not justify you behaving badly. You wrote in your edit comment that you undid my edit. So I believed that you did so. I'm pleased if you didn't. Bo Jacoby 19:39, 6 February 2007 (UTC).

Now I checked it. You actually undid my edit, exactly as you wrote in the edit comment. Now that we agree that this is bad behaviour, you are requested to reinstall my edit and return to the discussion if you disagree, or to improve if you have a contribution to make. Bo Jacoby 19:59, 6 February 2007 (UTC).

You think it's bad behavior. I don't. So there is no agreement on that score. I think I did a good thing by improving the article, and I also think you did a bad thing by scribbling nonsense.

Here's the edit comment I made. "(→Absolute value, conjugation and distance - Removed extraneous material that does not belong in this section of the article. Also removed redundant information.)" For the record, I left part of your previous edit intact. The History page does not lie.

On to specifics. I removed the phrase "the nonnegative real number" because it is redundant. The immediately preceding discussion of polar coordinates makes it abundantly clear that r ≥ 0. Saying the same thing over and over again annoys the reader.

I also removed a phrase "or 'length'" because it is extraneous (and, in fact, misleading). Complex numbers do not have lengths. Vectors have lengths. Line segments have lengths. While a line segment or a vector can be represented by a complex number, and vice versa, the three things are not identical. This article is about complex numbers. Information about geometric representations of complex numbers ought mostly to go in the article complex plane.

I also removed two entire sentences – "The other factor e^iφ = z / |z| is the direction of z. The length of a direction is one, and the direction of a length is one." This material is not only extraneous (it deals with neither absolute value, nor conjugation, nor distance); it is patent nonsense to boot. I have read at least a hundred books about complex analysis, and I have never before encountered a statement like "The length of a direction is one, and the direction of a length is one." That isn't even a mathematical concept. It sounds like liturgical dogma, and it has absolutely no place in this article. DavidCBryant 20:51, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I was refering to the edit to Exponentiation with the edit summary: "11:18, 2 February 2007 DavidCBryant (Talk | contribs) (Undid revision 105059128 by Bo Jacoby (talk) Revert to Trovatore's version. It's better.)". This is the edit that violated the Wikipedia:Resolving_disputes#Avoidance rule. Please undo it and move your discussion items to the discussion pages where they belong. By the way, did you also read Caspar Wessels article? Is there an English translation or do you read Danish? Your hundred books on complex analysis may be based on Gauss' works and not on Wessel's. The equation z=ae^iθ does not imply that a and θ are real numbers, because ae^iθ is defined also for complex values of a and θ, and so it is not redundant to be explicite on this point. The direction z/|z| has the length | z/|z| | = |z|/|z| = 1 for any nonzero complex number z. So the length of a direction is one. That is perfectly sound mathematics, even if you didn't know. You are not too old to learn, but you may be too young to listen. Bo Jacoby 21:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC).

Talking to you is a waste of time, Bo. I will not apologize, and I will continue to exercise my best judgment when I make changes to articles. I read both versions of the article before I reverted your edit of exponentiation on 2 Feb, 2007. Before you chopped it all up, the article read fairly smoothly. After you introduced a lot of new headers, and switched the order of presentation all around, the article was jumbled and confused. I put it back in order, thereby improving it. If you don't like that, go turn me in to the authorities, or something. I've spent far too much time explaining this already. DavidCBryant 22:23, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't request apologies and I don't request you not to exercise your best judgement, but I do request you to respect the wikipedia rules of conduct: "Be respectful to others and their points of view. This means primarily: Do not simply revert changes in a dispute". The proper place for discussing complex numbers is Talk:Complex_number, and the proper place for discussing exponentiation is talk:exponentiation, and the proper place for requesting you to repect WP conduct is this user talk page. So you may move the comments on my person from the Talk:Complex_number back to here, or delete it if you prefer that after cooling down. The Wikipedia:Resolving_disputes#First_step:_Talk_to_the_other_parties_involved contains the following rule: "When discussing an issue, stay cool and do not mount personal attacks". This rule you managed to break above. And the rule: "Take the other person's perspective into account and try to reach a compromise", which is not done by undoing the other persons edit, and the rule "Assume that the other person is acting in good faith unless you have clear evidence to the contrary". I don't doubt your good faith. I merely suggest you from now on to the benefit of all parties to behave WP-like. Bo Jacoby 06:40, 7 February 2007 (UTC).