...that our friend Grey didn’t appreciate my addition to his entry as it seems he has deleted it from SEB’s database without comment. That’s a shame as I spent a couple of hours doing the research and writing it up, but I suppose I should have gone ahead and changed the authorship to my own name considering the major addition I made to it. That would’ve kept him from deleting it as well. Not sure if it’s a case of embarrassment or frustration on his part, but it’s gone now and we’ll just have to learn to live with the loss.
Interestingly enough, Grey hasn’t bothered to remove the unexpanded version from his own blog even after having the truth of it revealed to him. No updated indicating that the events depicted in the email didn’t happen quite the way it’s portrayed therein, no hint that it’s anything other than 100% true. I’m beginning to suspect he’s not much for the truth if it gets in the way of his biases.
Wow, you guys have been busy while I was sleeping. Let me see if I can address some of .rob’s complaints (thank you for the compliments, .rob). Sit back, this is going to be long-winded.
I’d like to remind folks that when I first set up the option to have folks submit entries I made it clear that this wasn’t going to be the NYT and that I reserved the right to accept or reject submissions based on what I felt was appropriate to SEB. Beyond saying that I’d reject flat out attempts at flame wars or spam, I did say that I would consider whatever was proffered and I wouldn’t edit them beyond simple spelling and/or punctuation. I believe I’ve stuck to that pretty well even in regards to the entry Grey submitted and here’s why.
There have been roughly half a dozen or so submissions that I’ve just not bothered to approve for one reason or another and there have been two that I have yanked after they were published. The first was “Depopulation Bomb” by Fred Call because he was largely the only person commenting on it and it was a nonsensical mess as a result. The other one was Amy’s “More seasonal abuses of the unbeliever” which I pulled specifically because she wrote me an email requesting that I do so with an explanation on why she wanted me to retract it. I sent a reply to her with a quick discussion of her reasoning and asking if she were sure she wanted it pulled and, when she said yes, I went ahead and removed it. I’m not against removing something someone submitted if they want me to and have good reasons for it.
By and large I haven’t edited any submissions for the content and this was true in Grey’s submission as well. Other than capitalizing his sentences and proper nouns, it appeared in its entirety as he had submitted it. However, I did add an editor’s note to the start indicating that I was going to include additional content that would rebut the premise of the submission. I also went out of my way to ensure that this additional content was separated on the main page of the site from Grey’s submission and on the comments page by a horizontal rule and a heading indicating that the following would be my addition. I thought these measures were more than enough to insure that there was no confusion on where Grey’s thoughts stopped and mine started. In my opinion I did not “add comments and addendums within the original text beyond the author’s original words” as .rob claims as my comments and addendums were clearly delineated as such and I went out of my way to make certain that was clear to everyone.
Should I have kept my comments out of the main entry and put them in the “comments” section? Honestly, I don’t see how that makes any real difference. The content would’ve been the same regardless and you’d have to go to the comments page to see them in both situations. If you were to visit only the main page the only addition would’ve been my editor’s note above Grey’s submission and you never would’ve seen my comments unless you made a point of doing so. The same is true of the RSS feeds because I put my comments in the extended text. If I had done as .rob claims I wouldn’t have bothered to make such a clear point of separation and would have just mixed my comments directly into Grey’s submission so that it all showed up on the main index. And I’ve done just that sort of thing when I’ve copied an article from another site in order to write a rebuttal of it.
Which brings up another point: Would it have been better if I had just rejected Grey’s submission, then gone to his website and cut and pasted his original entry from there into a new entry here with a link back to his and then proceeded to rip it to shreds without separating the content? Based on .rob’s comment and the fact that I’ve done such things before without his complaining about it I’d have to assume he would think that perfectly OK, but I’m not sure I understand why that makes a difference. If it’s purely a matter of who’s name is on the entry then I’ll make a point to change it to my own in the future if I should ever do something like this again because that’d be the only difference between what he’s objecting to and what I’ve done in the past.
As a point of fact, Grey’s submission was actually less modified than some of the other’s I’ve posted in the past. A couple of submissions were about good topics, but contained a mere handful of sentences without much in the way of content from the news item they were pointing to that would give readers here any idea on why they’d want to check out the link. In those cases I’ve gone ahead and made major changes to the content by adding in material from the link they were pointing to and reformatting the entry so that links weren’t just raw URLs dropped into the entry. You may have even noticed one user in the past thanking me for fleshing it out a bit in his comments to it. I agonized about those changes for quite awhile before making them as I realized I was drastically changing the content that was submitted and mixing my own voice in with the original author’s and I don’t take that lightly at all. I ultimately decided in those cases that the changes I was making were similar to how in a group conversation you’ll help a friend clarify a point he’s trying to make because you understand what he’s trying to say, but he’s having trouble coming up with the right words.
Additionally, I will admit that it was Grey’s accusation of me having “bias goggles” that prompted me to look more closely at his submission and decide to not only post it, but add my comments onto the end of it. It’s clear from a couple of the comments he’s made recently that he submitted the entry specifically to see if I would post it and was probably hoping I wouldn’t so he could have some basis for claiming that I’m overly biased against opposing viewpoints. When it became obvious that he was demonstrating his own biases by not looking into the veracity of the submission himself before entering it, well, that just made it all the more worthwhile.
Lastly, I’d like to address the point .rob raised about the entry being “the author’s original words” as there was very little in Grey’s submission that was original. In fact, of the 29 sentences that composed the submission, a grand total of 5 of them were “Grey’s Original Words"™ and they consisted entirely of the following:
The first paragraph appeared before and the second after the forwarded email. Grey’s total opinions on the content of his submission consists of two points: 1) the email was “profound” and 2) Islam is the “most screwed up” religion.
[sarcasm mode] Whoa, that’s some heady and insightful commentary there! I’d better not mess with that! [/sarcasm mode]
For that matter, the email he’s commenting on isn’t even completely that author’s original words as it has been modified (which I mentioned in my rebuttal). Most of my rebuttal was directed at the author of the email itself (and Christians who swallow such prattle without looking into it) rather than Grey, though I did say that it was indicative of the lazy thinking some folks like Grey tend to engage in.
Obviously I don’t agree that I did anything wrong and, if anything, I think I went out of my way to make sure I did it appropriately. I can see how I probably should have changed the author attribution to myself considering the large amount of original text I tacked onto the end. I could also see the argument that I may as well have chopped Grey’s input from it entirely as my main focus was on the forwarded email more so than Grey’s exhaustive and well-thought out commentary about it.
But I am willing to listen to more reasoning about why I’m in the wrong here as I’ve been taken to task before when folks thought I stepped over the line. If there’s a consensus that I should avoid doing this sort of thing in the future then I will. If there’s a proper way I should follow that folks think I should undertake then I don’t have a problem with that if it’ll keep folks happy.
Hey, at least this isn’t nearly as bad as the chastising I took for my (admittedly) nasty Tammy Faye entry awhile back.