Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Well, obviously I needed to be insulted and aggravated some more. An hour after I sent my response, I get a reply which not only contradicts itself (Albert doesn't seem to remember whether or not he's seen Wikipedia before) but continues to insult my abilities, my intelligence, my manners and my motives. It's half top-quoted, half in-quoted, it has one of those confidentiality and responsibility disclaimer footers that are the legal equivalent of bull nipples, and to top it all off he finishes up with:

"My suggestion to you is to be less confronting and perhaps then you will not receive abrupt responses."

Oh, good one! Gee, does the pot want to call the kettle black some more? I can only assume this has been taken as a personal insult, or the fact that I inadvertently misremembered Mercedes College as Meredith College has enraged Mr Sabadin beyond sense and reason. I have the real, visceral desire to send the full copies of the correspondence to their headmaster and point out that if his students give his college a bad reputation with a few people who might see the edits on Wikipedia before the reviewers come in and revoke them, then their IT director manages to give an even worse impression amongst his peers. Who then blog it as a warning to others.

But the inevitable feeling that this is yet another fight that I really have to ask myself whether I want to participate. Spend some more time writing and posting (because there's no way I'd trust an email to get through untampered) a letter to their headmaster, only to find that the well has already been poisoned? Because, in the grand scheme of things, a few students have been defacing a site that is very good at repairing and removing such defacements? Compared to the problem of bullying, or parents being unhappy at fee increases, or the question of which of the sporting teams has disgraced the school recently, the Wikipedia issue pales into insignificance. I feel that the best I could hope for would be no response at all, or a "thank you for your concern" form letter. The worst would be months of aggravation, or possibly even some lawsuit claiming defamation and aggravated verbal assault, somehow. Who knows?

It seems that this is the danger with trying to do what one sees as the right thing.