Sorry to post about Wikipedia again. I made the mistake of checking on the deletion thread there this morning (I blame Dirk Deppey for linking to it in Journalista! this morning and reminding me of it) and I see another mischaracterization of ComixTalk by the Wikipedia user Dragonfiend.
This time he/she (really I don’t know the slighest thing about the person who owns the "dragonfiend" account) references a thread that is a number of years old (CORRECTION – It only felt like this was a subject from years ago since wikidrama has been going on for far too long – it is actually a thread from March of this year.) and says that "contributors" call him/her names. What galls me is that this Dragonfiend knows from reading that thread that what she’s quoting are comments posted by visitors to ComixTalk and that ComixTalk is not responsible for those comments. (UPDATE: For the record some of the commenters in the thread in question have written article(s) for ComixTalk in the past. Like many publications we solicit and publish articles from many writers. Those writers, however, do not "work" for ComixTalk and it doesn’t mean the editors have editorial control over the comments that they post to our site. Again, it’s inaccurate from someone to imply that comments on this site represent the views of ComixTalk itself.)
Visitors posting comments to ComixTalk are no more "contributors" to our site than any random person editing Wikipedia is an administrator of the site. Unless Wikipedia is prepared to be responsible for content added to its site at every moment (and I might add the "history" of such entries since Dragonfiend is pointing to a years-old post) than it is fairly hypocritical and self-serving for an active Wikipedian like Dragonfiend to mischaracterize the ownership of comments on another site.
And unfortunately this is the second time he/she has made such a mistaken statement in a public forum. The very article she has linked to (not the comments to it that she’s complaining of) is a discussion of a tremendously unfair and misleading statement that Dragonfiend made in an interview with T Campbell for the news website Broken Frontier. Dragonfiend pointed to an obvious troll/vandal entry on comixpedia.org and, frankly, by characterizing it as a typical or normal good faith entry, used it to cast aspersion on the entire website. Frankly for a person of her/his experience with Wikipedia and therefore obvious knowledge of how an open wiki works, I was tremendously disappointed by what seemed like an effort to intentionally mislead the readers of Broken Frontier as to the character and quality of the entire comixpedia.org project. While I might disagree with Dragonfiend on many issues regarding the "notability" of aspects of comics, I don’t see why he/she needs to insert carefully-worded seemingly-personal attacks into the debate and I would urge her/him to be more careful in how he/she writes such statements in the future.
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