I wish her well, and congratulate her on a strong academic record.

What is the ‘meaning’ within the elements of the series?

Obviously here Jeff consented after-the-fact (and then revoked his consent and the content was quickly removed). But generally consent should be sought before content changes. I mean, what if someone posted and then wasn’t at a computer all day? The “if you object I’ll remove it” becomes pointless. If particular authors want to grant blanket permission, that’s their right. But it shouldn’t be assumed.

I’d likewise assume that nobody should be reading my draft posts, although I believe those with administrator powers theoretically have the ability to do so (I have no idea if anyone has). Again, not a policy I thought needed to be mentioned, but after this kerfuffle I’d like it known that no one has permission to read my draft posts.

There was one exception, and it happened before I was an author. I emailed an article to Dave that I liked and asked if he could post it. He generously obliged me, but then decided to frame it with his commentary… which amounted to a putdown of the writer of the article.

Mmmm, I think that was when I decided to learn how to author…which, come to think of it, might have been his strategy.

I also worry a bit about democracy. Will those who are heavily interested in politics vote out the posters on the arts? Will we mute beginning posters’ by voting negatively on their initial efforts before they’ve had time to find a voice? Will the results be easily manipulated (such as by a single reader entering multiple times)? And (believe it or not, since this is coming from me), we might not be fair to Dave and some other posters who have won our irritation historically and whose posts at least one of us may not approach with an unbiased eye (just speaking for myself there).

Given that my name is associated with the board of EphBlog, I am actually personally embarrassed by this post. But I am also unwilling to ask David to take it down. I’d rather just find a way to make clear to passers-by that what David thinks is appropriate is not the same as what the EphBlog community thinks is appropriate.

Hence, the suggestion for blog democracy.

It was minor stuff. The point is that I don’t like people messing with things that are posted under my name without asking me first (I don’t count adjusting the size of a photograph as being in that category, and it was fine that you and Ronit fixed my photographs — and that was even done at my emailed request to Ronit on at least two occasions).

I happen to trust Ronit’s judgment, from experience and from the policy he has articulated and posted in this thread (which is, not surprisingly, consistent with my experience of his involvement), but that is my trust from experience and I wouldn’t generalize from it to other posters or other editors.

My problem with your intrusions is that I fear you might make changes that would be very serious from my perspective (and I feel that you don’t separate yourself from EphBlog sufficiently — what I write is something that I have authorship of and that does not change just because I post it on EphBlog; you personally don’t have additional rights with respect to it merely because it appears on EphBlog). You will appreciate, I believe, that I would be horrified if you appended the photograph of a certain Eph spouse cheerleader to something I had posted. What you may not understand is that, if I had posted a story about members of the royal family being driven around the Berkshires by a tux-clad minion and trying to cadge free services at local establishments and you had gratuitously added to it a heavily-PhotoShopped photograph of a young royal (who, to make it worse, might not have even been on the trip) and thereby derailed my post, I would be even more horrified. Our values and our reactions to many things are extremely different and I am acutely aware of that but I sense that you are not.

On a practical level, people never develop skills if they aren’t given the chance. Life is messy. The posts are good enough. They don’t need to be “punched up” or whatever you think you are doing. Please, just relax, sit back, and enjoy the conversation. Let it flow. Don’t leave people worrying that you will change what they post. And never forget that “minor” to you may be “major” to someone else, that many people are sensitive about being edited without their prior consent, and that we are (at last I thought we were) trying to promote a respectful, thoughtful conversation and exchange of information about Williams College and people, events, and things related to it.

Problem is, currently, discussions about appropriateness always get framed in terms of “censorship” and whether or not someone had a right to post something. These discussion turn heated and personal and are deeply unhelpful.

It’s not a question of whether or not David had a “right” to post something, it is more about whether or not the actual content being posted is the sort of thing that we, as a community, would like to see on EphBlog. What I’m proposing is that a voting tool would allow for some measure of editorial “democracy”, such that our readers would feel like their preferences are an important part of what shapes this site.

I hate, hate, hate pointless legalistic discussions, especially the ones that turn personal. I’d rather just provide a simple way for readers to tell us which posts they dislike and which they like. Just my opinion.

If you could convince me that a voting widget would mean less threads like this one, I’d be all for it. But I fear, that instead we’d get more of this @*&#, and less of the stuff that now serves to balance it.

I stand corrected on my use of “yellow journalism”. And yes, “worst” is much better (and you would know), so thank you for setting me straight.

As for which is more “newsworthy”, the story of Fergie stopping at the Inn, or whether or not Eugenie is coming to Williams, your distinction makes sense, but has little to do with what was actually discussed here…which is my whole point, Ben. This thread was intentionally steered in the direction it ended up going. And it was done so under the guise of freely discussing all things Eph.

And though I may not know “anything at all about [Eugenie's] personal feelings”, and “how this post would or would not affect her college choice”, if you can’t see the potential harm, and embarrassment, a thread like this on EB, could cause to a young woman heading off to Williams for the first time, then I don’t know how to explain it to you.

And you wrap up your comment with the admonishment that I need to “grow thicker skin” in order to have a discussion about Fergie and her daughter coming to Williams. When and if we have that discussion, I will see if I need it.

In the meantime, judging from your comment, I’d like to suggest that you might learn to read more carefully, and develop a bit more empathy.

What would NOT be in bounds would be trolling Facebook for pictures of the young woman at Williams’ parties or recruiting students to document her life around campus. But if the young woman chooses to go on television or pose for magazines, then I reckon those moments are in bounds.

Not what I come to Ephblog to read, but not ethically impaired.

Here is my policy: as an administrator of Ephblog, I assume I have the liberty to make minor edits like fixing garbled links and garbled images – or where something was clearly intended to be a link or inline image by the author but failed to be one. If an image is too large and is blocking the sidebars, I will usually reduce the size a little and link it to the original, full-size image. If line breaks and other formatting got garbled by copying something from Word into Wordpress, I will fix that if I have the time (hint: if you’re composing in Word, use the “paste from Word” button – it looks like a clipboard with a little Word logo on top of it).

If I have additional context, commentary, etc. to add to the post, I will usually do so through the comments. However, if a post was never categorized by the author, and I feel that it would significantly help future searchers and archive-browsers to have it categorized, I may tag it with some appropriate categories. Apart from that, I would not change the actual content of any other author’s post, unless I’m specifically requested to do so by the original author or by the Board.

In essence, I hope to facilitate the conversation on EphBlog, and any adding or fixing of links or categories is aimed at making sure readers get the appropriate (author-intended) context and content, and not at titillating the viewer. At some point in the near future, while I deal with a backlog of other EphBlog related stuff, I hope to post a guide to formatting your posts – images, blockquotes, things like that. These are also things that can be figured out with Google.

[C]ould you please try to have some confidence in others and their ability to post and comment without your injections of “value” and the like?

Do I need to post the thank-you e-mails that I have received from folks like Wick Sloane and Sophmom and others when I have edited/updated their posts? Just because you don’t like X, don’t assume that other authors don’t like X.

Let me put myself on record, rather than let you think you have license from me to change what I write without seeking my prior approval: you don’t.

Again, please let Ronit know that you don’t want him touching your posts. I don’t think that he has gotten the memo yet. Or perhaps you are fine with every other administrator except for me fixing your formatting. In that case, Ronit can continue as before.

Rory: Too funny! Here is the actual e-mail exchange between me and Jeff:

hope you don’t mind that I updated your post with picture and paragraph

If you object, I can remove it.

Great catch!

Dave

Jeff replied.

Nope, thanks for the addition.

So, I guess that it is a pleasant fantasy to imagine that I am, willy-knilly, editing the posts of other authors against their preferences, but, in this specific case, the author in question thanked me, as I suspected he would.

Dave, you have “punched up” and changed my posts before. Fortunately, it was in minor ways, but I did not like it because I don’t like people changing or adding to what I have written, without asking my prior permission.

Can you provide the specific “posts” of yours that I changed in a way that bothers you? We could then have a useful discussion about the topic. (I certainly won’t touch a post of yours in the future.)

Thing is, I can’t recall editing your posts in anything other than a fix-the-photo-formatting sort of way except on two occasions, although it certainly might have happened more often. In doing a quick tour, I find that this post, this one and this one were all edited by someone other than you, but it wasn’t me. It was Ronit.

Here is one that I changed. In that case, all that I did was to add “width=”300″ height=”356″” to the image html code so that text layout around the photo was more pleasant. Here is another example.

And, after a post by you like this, you can hardly blame Ronit and me if we assume that you are happy to have us fix the formatting.

Again, as best that I can tell, on only two occasions, have I added a visible word to any of your posts: here and here. It won’t happen again.

No, from my perspective, Dave, you did not add value: quite the opposite, for reasons noted by a plethora of readers. You ruined an interesting post by another poster, and did so with cheap and unfounded sensationalism and at the expense of a young woman who may not even be involved in the underlying story. Have you absolutely no ability to restrain yourself? Is this all about audience for you?

I had thought that the endeavor was to keep people up-to-date about, and to provide a forum for sharing thoughtful conversations about, “All Things Eph.” I suppose that, really stretching it, everything you say and think and do is something “Eph” because you are an alumnus, but I literally physically gag at that idea. If you have any interest in this endeavor succeeding as EphBlog, not some bizarre (and I’ll be nice and leave off two other, much rougher, adjectives that immediately come to mind) personal KaneBlog, could you please try to have some confidence in others and their ability to post and comment without your injections of “value” and the like?

It is yellow journalism at it’s best.

I think you mean “worst,” but in any case, it’s not yellow journalism at all. Which story is actually newsworthy: the Dutchess of York getting a favor from the owners of the Williams Inn, or the fact she was meeting about one of her daughters possibly attending Williams? It’s not close. The former isn’t newsworthy, except in a soft, human interest-y type of way; the second is the type of thing that’s discussed here all the time. How many threads do we have about applicants’ essays and the like? Tons. Because EphBlog finds it interesting.

And in doing that, you have managed to distract everyone here into forgetting that this is all based on hearsay.

So what? We need proof before we can discuss something? Since when? This isn’t something like the Edwards Affair, when it was arguable that one really needed to have the goods before throwing around accusations on such a sensitive topic. This is a largely positive (or at least not negative) mention of someone extremely famous possibly coming to Williams. If you’re just mad that David didn’t put a question mark in the title of this post, well …

And, frankly, I find it amazing that, as the father of young women, you are unable to set aside your compulsive need for a lively controversial thread, for even the very small moment required to consider the personal feelings of another young woman…one who should never have been made the subject of this post to begin with.

Respectfully, you don’t know anything at all about her personal feelings, so this is pointless. Nobody has any idea how this post would or would not affect her college choice.

We have here a story, which no one seems to think is untrustworthy, of Fergie coming to Williams to talk about her daughter attending. Fergie has one college-age daughter, who happens to get good grades and take art history. The daughter has been on the cover of Tatler, which offensively PhotoShopped her. If connecting these dots really offends anyone, they should grow thicker skin.

There is a larger point here that is being missed, and avoided, depending on which side you are arguing.

I believe you knew exactly what you were doing when you took Jeff’s article and made it into something it wasn’t. There were no facts to warrant your turning that story into this one. You did what every slimy gossip magazine attempts, which is to capitalize on a kernel of something acceptable, and stretch it into something with a more attention-getting headline, indeed, a whole new story. It is yellow journalism at it’s best.

And in doing that, you have managed to distract everyone here into forgetting that this is all based on hearsay. You don’t have any real evidence that this young woman has even applied for admission, and yet you have her accepted as the “Class of 13″.

And, frankly, I find it amazing that, as the father of young women, you are unable to set aside your compulsive need for a lively controversial thread, for even the very small moment required to consider the personal feelings of another young woman…one who should never have been made the subject of this post to begin with. You must believe yourself very far removed to not understand how easily one person could be the other but for a simple twist of fate. I find that very naive on your part.

So, if this young woman did apply, and is accepted, we here at EB may have given her sufficient reason to go elsewhere. If not, and she ends up attending, then I commend her. Either way, we have done her no favors, and all for what? A contentious discussion that led nowhere…and all at her expense.

Stewart wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” (emphasis added)