Cooling Off Period

A CoolingOffPeriod is a time taken for reflection before responding to something which has just made me PissedOffAndExtremelyAngry. For me that is often when something I thought I had sorted out turns out to need some more effort.

If you're trying to cool off and the "time taken for reflection" isn't helping you calm down, there are other ways.

• Ask someone who isn't involved to talk about it. Face to face may be better for 'net problems.

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I have just returned from holiday. When I left Wiki was quite quiet. I can tell there is a row now on Wiki because http://c2.com/cgi/RecentChanges shows up a number of pages which have been edited lots of times. e.g. currently for PissedOffAndExtremelyAngry

-1791, -1, -50 del, 1824, -1742, 1740, 178, -1902, 1900, -1900, 1912, -1912, 1912, -1896, 1896, -1896, 1896, -1895, -1, 2090, 662, -25, 470, 816, 30

The interesting thing would be to compute the average, as so many of the numbers cancel out.

FundamentalFlaw has even more edits.

2760, 779, 122, 85, 151, 109, 168, 664, -159, 165, 1072, 253, 133, 247, 327, 248, 178, 187, 133, 97, 196, 160, 47, 399, 66, 326, -144, 144, -193, 275, -223, 223, -223, 223, 0, 327, -327, 327, -550, 550, -135, 739, 183, 198, 219, 250, 68, 169, 32, 184, 222, 93, 136, -6, 115, 100, 125, 32, 102, 2075, -2, 2245, 2538, 2200, 81, 100, 73, 2777, 634, 1099, 147, 1156, 299, 86, 879, 103, 267, -1447, 2567, 368, 461, 374, 55, 1508, 524, 1027, -64, 391, 720, 422, -861

This shows that something is going on, even without looking at the content, although here the average is positive, so that contributions are not always being deleted.

I care about Wiki and the people who use it. I hope that it will continue to be a place where ideas can be exchanged. I invite those who are angry and upset to use a CoolingOffPeriod before responding to someone else's edit.

Note that I am not suggesting a built in delay between edits. Quick editing is needed here to combat spam.

-- JohnFletcher

I don't quite see how you are in any confusion as to what is going on; you need merely read just the topmost part of FundamentalFlaw and PissedOffAndExtremelyAngry (page created anonymously, for reasons that are obvious once you get the drift of what's up).

The exchange between Matthew and myself does not require outside intervention to suggest a CoolingOffPeriod, as should be plain. -- DougMerritt

I think Doug & I are cool now, but if there's any doubt then the CoolingOffPeriod is a good thing. These are doubtful times, so if it's OK I'll let it sit a while before attempting any constructive shrinking myself. -- MatthewAstley, DeleteWhenCooked

Hmm, I'm getting FeatureRequestBuzz?: Referential integrity / reference counting and garbage collection... I did find myself dereferencing a null pointer at "[minor issue deleted]". I doubt that such heavy concepts can be simply bolted on to this wiki. -- MatthewAstley

Sorry to seem confused. That was not my intention. -- John