User talk:Emj04

List of Haverford College People
I'm not going to undo your work on the List of Haverford College People page. However, particularly with respect to the honorary degree recipients, you're putting up a great deal of information which simply duplicates what's on the College Website (to which you've provided a link). The descriptive sentence at the beginning of the list, followed by the link, is actually enough. The person who created the separate page for the List of People took the position that the alumni/faculty listing on the main HC page had far too many names, and moved it over here. I'm afraid that if the List of People page keeps getting longer and longer, someone with no knowledge of Haverford is going to take it upon himself to prune it mercilessly. Thanks for your consideration. John, HC '85 JTRH 20:39, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Hello John, Thank you for your comments. I just felt that Haverford does not do enough to get the College's name "out there"; that being said, I will cease adding anymore names to the list or from revising the pages associated with the College. I hope this satisfies you. Sincerely, Eric HC'04


 * Hi, Eric. Thanks for the response. If it were up to me, you could upload the entire Alumni Directory :-). I don't want to criticize your work in any way, because I appreciate your enthusiasm, initiative, and loyalty to Haverford! But if you haven't seen it already, you need to be aware of this conversation. I don't know if you are  this person who was anonymously adding to the list earlier, but to put it briefly,  ElKevbo, who has no apparent Haverford connection, decided that the list was too long, and he was going to arbitrarily reduce it if someone else didn't edit it down. As it is, he created a separate page for it, but that doesn't mean he won't come back later and reduce the new page on his own. I point out "no apparent Haverford connection" because it's entirely likely that someone who doesn't know anything about HC or Quakerism might decide that someone such as (for example) Rufus Jones or Steve Cary wouldn't be sufficiently "notable" to survive a cut. So I'm trying to keep the Haverford pages in the hands of those who know something about the place. :-)


 * I don't know if you're new to Wikipedia, but you need to be prepared to have your work "mercilessly edited" by people who frequently 
 * (a) write horribly,
 * (b) don't know what they're talking about, and
 * (c) given (a) and (b) still think they know more than you do, and can describe it better than you can. :-)


 * Best, John JTRH 22:54, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi John, Once again, thanks for clarifying. I had not seen the conversation you referred to. Like I said in my original reply, I will not contribute any more to Haverford's page -- while I'm a proud alumnus of an institution that has given so much for me, I am not the Alumni/External Relations Coordinator. I've been engaged in conversation with younger alumni and some have expressed concern on how the college has "lost prestige" over the years with the rankings. When I entered HC, US News and World Report ranked the College at #4. Four years later when I graduated, it had dropped to #7. Now, it's #9. Adding/organizing the names of alumni and the honorary degree recipients were my ways of boosting publicity and pride in our small liberal arts college. That being said, I appreciate your "trust, concern, and respect" (the pillars the Honor Code Orienteers ingrained in our heads during Customs Week), I will stop revising my alma mater's wiki page, and leave it to others. If you feel the wiki is too crowded, I invite you to "revert" the page to previous editions. Take care, Eric


 * Eric, please don't just drop your involvement with the Haverford pages. If you'd like to contribute to the main article, that would be great. Your knowledge of the place is a lot more current (and therefore more relevant) than mine is. Another thing you should be aware of, though, is Wikipedia's discouragement of "Academic Boosterism", which at least one person (who's visited the HC page more than once) interprets to mean that he should patrol college and university pages and excise such words as "elite," "selective" and "prestigious" wherever he finds them. (I certainly don't agree with his interpretation of the policy, but I'm not going to follow him around and revert all his edits.)


 * Another thing you might want to consider is putting a list (as long as you would care to make it!) on another server (can alumni have personal pages at haverford.edu?) and linking to that page from the Haverford Wikipedia article. No one's going to complain about that.


 * Again, I really appreciate your hard work on Haverford's (and Wikipedia's!) behalf, and I'm not criticizing your contributions, just letting you know that your work may be subject to very severe editing from people who don't know anything about the Honor Code. :-) Best, John JTRH 01:04, 25 July 2007 (UTC)