Talk:MacCentral

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This article appears to have been edited to become some sort of screed about MacCentral Forums. Wikipedia is a source of information, not a place for lashing out against those who you feel have done you wrong. I've edited the piece to retain information about the life and death of the MacCentral Forums, but IMO spending a page listing the comings and goings of individual forum users and projects is completely inappropriate for a Wikipedia article. (Disclosure: I am the editorial director of Mac Publishing, owner of the MacCentral domain and intellectual property. I am also a Wikipedia user.) Jsnell (talk) 18:42, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

{{Request edit}}

I've made these edits but I would prefer that someone with a true NPOV - not me, not the members of the MacCentral Forum - make a judgment about what is relevant and what is irrelevant in this article. Jsnell (talk) 18:49, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Y Done I've trimmed the text down, altered the tone, and removed the usernames as non-notable. I have no comment on the number of entries in the chronology. SHEFFIELDSTEEL^TALK 03:07, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I've deleted all the personal news as well as the derogatory verbiage directed towards MacWorld and added today's news of the death of Stan Flack. I doubt anyone but a member of the MacCentral Forum would be knowledgeable enough to edit this page. Certainly a MacWorld editor should not be allowed to strip it to nothing. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. This includes history, warts and all. MBCF (talk) 19:31, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

As I can see from your user page, MBCF, you are an advocate for NPOV. In my opinion this article has gone way past NPOV, and also IMO the level of detail of the chronology is completely beyond anything that should appear on Wikipedia. (Or perhaps, if you wanted to argue it, it belongs in a dedicated MacCentral Forums article.) In any event, I've tagged this article as a request for an edit in some hopes that someone not employed by Mac Publishing and not a member of the MacCentral Forums will take a look and apply a level of scrutiny without any conflict of interest. (And by the way, thanks for mentioning Stan -- he probably deserves a page of his own.) Jsnell (talk) 21:10, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

 : The latest contribution from MacBeemer ("May 18, 2007 The sun rises at the correct time in the east.") shows just how seriously some users take Wikipedia. It's small-minded vandalism. There are lots of places on the Internet to grind axes... this should not be one of them. Jsnell (talk) 22:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

The reinsertion of one line to this article was not small minded vandalism, merely a minor restoration of some of the wholesale destruction brought on to this article of the history of a conduit for a community. Owing to the nature of the Wikipedia project and community, I suggest jsnell refrain from making personal remarks in these pages, or further edits to the MacCentral article. Macbeemer (talk) 12:21, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

The N in NPOV is neutral not "none". I would think it quite dificult for anyone who was not an active member of the MCF forums to write an informative history of MacCentral. There is a reason why someone who is an employee of the organization described should not do massive deletes as you did from a wikipedia web page. A note in this talk page pointing out what should be removed will work. You pointed out macbeemer's addition and I will remove it. Easy. He perhaps is lashing back after you deleted most of the page. Let me clean up the page a bit and see if there is anything left which offends you. We do need to write a page for Stan Flack. MBCF (talk) 00:31, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I can't help but feel some responsibility for this controversy, as this was an article I birthed in 2003 [1] one day. In any event, no, I am not a writer for Macworld, and no, I am not a member of the MacCentral forums, so I am probably asking for trouble by thinking I might try to moderate this dispute. (I currently do a bit of work with Mac|Life, but that's beside the point.)

I realize that a community is important to the people that were in it. I also think that this article goes way beyond the amount of detail needed for encyclopedias. Specifically, the chronology is kind of a turnoff, and looks like a violation of WP:NOR as well as WP:V. It doesn't help that nothing in the article is cited, (see WP:CITE), and I unfortunately deserve some of the blame for that, as I didn't cite a thing when I created the article, setting the tone for future edits also not to be cited.

Moreover, the chronology is not written in a way that someone outside of the community would understand why it is relevant. I remember hearing about JohnInTX, but I ultimately don't understand why he or Terry11 belong in the chronology, especially with no explanation given.

I have a big deadline coming up, so I am not going to do any serious work on the article until after that. But once I get some time, I will try to bring the article more in line with the wikipedia core policies referenced above, and of course, WP:NPOV.

In the meantime, I am putting an unreferenced tag on the entire article. Bugmuncher (talk) 06:30, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I've cleaned out more of the chronology which after the passage of time has become irrelevant. I am a proponent of leaving a chronology in as it would be a big mistake to have the birth of the internet be known for only its latest iteration and no historical chronology is left. It is a huge problem to historians that even the major news sites, CNN, MSNBC, treat history as yesterday's trash. The internet Wayback Machine will be insufficient to reproduce how this technology changed over time. What Bill Buckner had for breakfast on October 25, 1986 is no longer relevant but the fact that a baseball went between his legs is still very important to readers of his wiki page. The death of a major contributor to the forum under discussion means nothing to the casual observer but means quite a bit to the participants. The date of their passing demarcates a milestone where participants and historians can see that a major change to the topic being chronicled has changed.

Citation is a problem for the very reason the chronology should be left and filled out. The body of work which should be the primary source of citation, the MCF forum database, has been deleted. Citation can be personal communication, Forum member alone, since the source is gone. Postings at MacMinute could be used as citations for most of the chronology but where do those links go when MacMinute is deleted? (A good example is the first Mosaic, a great example of a new phenomena, an online community acting together to create a communal work of art and selling it for charitable reasons. But the primary source of that work of art has been permanently deleted by MacWorld. I will try to get a version of the first Mosaic online so it can be linked.) MBCF (talk) 12:17, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

No, the forum should not be "the primary source of citation," simply because WP articles shouldn't depend on primary sources. From WP:SOURCES: "Articles should rely on reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." If there are third-party articles about the MacCentral Forums, let's see some citations. If there aren't, then it's not something that Wikipedia should include. Dori (talk) 19:30, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Nice job on the splitting of the two chronologies. I was thinking that booting the chronology might be the best thing (and since I started it I always admit writing stupid stuff) but having two makes clear what happened. Here is where i apologize for writing what jsnell called a screed, it was, and should have been deleted. To make amends I am off to find a reference or two. Please check these as my mangling of references in wiki is well known.MBCF (talk) 15:36, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

My first impulse was to delete the forum-related chronology, and I instead moved all the forum info into its own area so that if the consensus became that it should be deleted, it would be clear what should/shouldn't go. Or iow, I'm also in favor of cutting it. Dori (talk) 22:03, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I think to remove it would be a huge mistake. The MacCentral Forums became larger than MacCentral itself. There have been around three hundred users of that forum which have posted from 1999 to 2008. This kind of forum experience will never be replicated in the future. It was an anomaly of the first iteration of the internet. It would be a mistake to delete that experience and remove that type of historical perspective from the history of the internet. Read the eulogy posts at MacMinute for Stan Flack in the past few days. Members of MacCentral have been checking in from years back to extend condolences. That, the MacCentral forum, even more than the news web site that Stan Flack created was what MacCentral was all about. To delete any record that the MacCentral forum existed would be as if denying MacCentral had ever existed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MBCF (talk • contribs) 01:07, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Looking for something to cite in a Wikipedia article about the MacCentral forum, but can't find an article to cite? It's not a problem. Hint: It's not that hard to get published in a niche category glutted with publishers. Surely someone from the MacCentral community can submit an article about the history of the Mac scene to a web site that covers the Mac scene... right? Bugmuncher (talk) 06:33, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

The MacCentral forums were an important part of Internet history, and this information should be available to those doing research on the history of the Internet and the resultant communities that were formed. To allow snell to censor this historical page because he couldn't force the MacCentral community to go to the Macworld forums when he closed down MacCentral is most definitely a conflict of interest. MacCentral no longer exists, except in history. There are no more members of MacCentral. snell killed that and now he's trying to kill the history of it, as well. donnab (talk) 03:24, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

donnab, I strongly suggest you go read WP:AGF. Dori (talk) 19:30, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Facts

Ok, so I have been looking at the articles cited here. The Editor's note by Jim Dalrymple says that MacCentral was weekly in 1994. The chronology says that MacCentral was monthly in DOCMaker format in 1995. These appear to be at odds... Bugmuncher (talk) 06:56, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

The "monthly" quote is from an interview of Stan Flack in 1999. The "weekly" is from an article Jim Dalyrimple wrote in April 2008. It is likely that Jim misremembered the original format in 1995 and that it tuned into a weekly after the start. I would leave the information in the page "monthly" as is because that reference is closer to the primary data, Stan and 1995. (Unless Jim D in personal communications changes it.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by MBCF (talk • contribs) 14:45, 25 May 2008 (UTC)