Talk:Aertheca

It seems that the administrators of Aertheca have found this entry and have taken exception to some of the critical remarks made here and reflected their views by editing the page.

Reflecting their views is fine of course, but wholesale deletion of critical remarks which seem to be factual, balanced, and respectful, is not what a Wiki is about and should be avoided. (Edited by Exacompta November 2007, and by 86.147.203.58 November 2007.)

I have undone the deletion of the critical notes by "lunaticRoo", and have put his comments in a separate section called "Retort by server administrator". --86.147.203.58 November 2007


 * Personal opinions are not encyclopedic style. Neither are statements which only "seem" to be factual and balanced. In addition, many of the comments were not respectful, and are now gone once again.
 * The last time I looked at this page, I removed the most blatant personal attack, but left the rest as questionable (partly due to a shortage of time). This time, I've revised the whole criticism portion in an attempt to bring the focus back to facts, and away from some people's apparent desire to bash the server. --The Krit 04:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Fair enough; the article has been much improved as a result of your edits, and I'm glad to see that you didn't delete the criticism entirely because:
 * a completely uncritical account of a server can be just as biased and far from the truth as biased criticism. Sometimes there is justified and justifiable criticism.
 * A wiki isn't an advertising section, and criticism can be a lot more informative than the usual gushing talk about what stories and doodah's a server contains. Of course personal attacks shouldn't be there, and any criticism should stick to facts. However if a server wants to advertise itself it can use its IGN pages. But even there people can post their opinion in a way that can't be deleted by opponents.


 * I admit that it's impossible to gauge whether personal opinion does or does not correspond to the truth, so it shouldn't be a part of the Wiki article. However the original criticism section contains 2 examples of why communication via the forum isn't working as well as it could
 * the sentence about areas being removed without notice on the forum which seems objective enough
 * the bit that implies that broken treads were reported, but subsequently ignored
 * There is such a thing as the "freedom of speech climate" of a server. On some servers you see e.g. a forum that contains no critical posts at all, and where any debate posts that can remotely be interpreted as criticism are prefaced by a grovelling and hand-wringing apology that the post isn't intended as criticism. When I see enough of such forum posts and no or very few critical posts, I tend to believe that the climate on the forum really is repressive. In such cases removing criticism from the Wiki on grounds that it is "personal opinion" can only lead to bias. Unfortunately you have to study the forum in order to get an idea if a personal opinion is or is not justified.
 * That's why I would plead for generally allowing a small "criticism" section even if that is unflattering for the server in question, possibly with a built-in "retort" section.
 * Exacompta 1 December 2007


 * "Criticism" and "retort" imply a debate style, and that would not be appropriate for an encyclopedia article. Furthermore, I think those sections would tend to attract more opinion than fact. A single "critique" section encompasses both criticism and promotion and is less likely to fall into the pitfalls of the individual sections.


 * As for mentioning areas being removed without notice, I kept that. It's just been downplayed since it seemed to me that the major point was the broken transition. Are unpublicized removal of areas common enough to warrant more emphasis?


 * I might have missed something in regards to the other point you think got reduced (deleted) too much. Which part exactly did you mean by "the bit that implies [...]"? The closest match I see to stuff I deleted is the part about bug reports being classified as "fixed" even though the bugs still exist. (That probably should come back in some form; I'll think about what form would work well.) Is that what you were referring to? --The Krit 17:20, 2 December 2007 (UTC)