Talk:Konstantin Staniukovich

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I hate to comment on my own work. I am forced to write the following in self-defence.

I wrote the article to fill in a link from the Russian language page on which I had been working for several days, sometimes logged in, and sometimes not. Since Staniukovich happens to be among my favourite Russian authors (I have the 1977 edition I refer to in the text), and the stories are excellent reading in depths of the cold, cold winter, the article wrote itself.

No sooner had I submitted it than someone grabbed it and put it, first on the "cleanup" list, and then on the "copyright violations" list. The reasons given were, more or less, as follows: I don't know anything, I can't prove anything, I haven't found anything, but I smell a rat!

Forgive me, it is not pleasant to say the following. The suspecting user's presumption is extraordinarily offensive. The very fact that someone could, without providing grounds, cast doubt on amateur work, which is by its definition all this project is, is reprehensible. I have no objection to what I wrote being edited, erased, or otherwise mutilated, that's what this wiki thing is all about. Accusations of partisanship are one thing. Accusations of copyright violation require grounds if they are not to be dismissed at once as slander. I wonder how many other would-be Wikipedists this 21-year old has wrecked the fun for. That's the saddest part of it all.

By the way, as I write this, the article is still on the cleanup list. What's the point? All articles, except the one one copyright, are ALWAYS on the cleanup list so far as I can tell. Wiki, right?

Now. The facts of the writer's life condense material published elsewhere: in the introductory chapters of all the collected works (which are in Russian, by the way), and a very different summary of Staniukovich's life, apparently from the original Brockhaus-Efron encyclopaedia of 1890-1906, or from its uncompleted second edition, c. 1910-1916. When I claim I wrote the thing off the yop of my head, that's literally true: I'd read the source materials, of course, but I didn't have them in front of me as I wrote. There was a mistake even: the guy died in 1903, not in 1902. The evaluation of the sea stories is mine. It was written, remember, as a stub that got ahead of itself.

A. Shetsen. Not logged in, but at: --68.148.211.161 11:52, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)