User talk:Lir

Lir hasn't been good for Wikipedia, but that's no reason to insult her (or him if you prefer) gratuitously. Unfortunately, Jimbo's version of this page, which has been dictatorially imposed (which I hasten to point out is quite unusual for him) does just this. It implies that there was an edit war here between two equally wrong sides, so that the only way to end it was to delete all of the text. But whatever abuses Lir has committed on Wikipedia, none of them were here. Instead, the edit war was simply a matter of one bully, Clutch, attempting to be as cruel as possible to her. To blame Lir for the problems on this page is simply to blame the victim, which is of course a gross insult. Whatever problems Lir has caused us -- and she has indeed caused us problems -- this is no excuse to permanently inshrine such an insult in our pages.

Since both the bully and the victim have been banned (both for other reasons), with no sign of a legitimate return from either, there won't be any more edit wars if Jimbo rescinds his order that this page be left as it is now. Instead, the page should either be returned to Lir's last edit; alternatively, the user pages of banned users could simply be left blank on the grounds that they're obsolete, as others have suggested elsewhere. I won't edit this page myself, even though it's been unprotected, because of Jimbo's order. However, that order is wrong (and out of date according to its own terms), so I urge him to remove it.

-- Toby Bartels 16:51 30 May 2003 (UTC)