Talk:W New York Downtown Hotel and Residences

Comment on images

In the last day I have tried to add an image to this article and improve the layout, and another user, BMK, began reverting every change I made. Specifically, the presentation of the large vertical image sandwiched between the infobox and the text looks wrong to me, and I thought it would be better below the text, and a bit smaller. On my mobile phone, you have to scroll past the infobox, then past the tall image before you get to the text. BMK cites a few concerns. One is a valid concern about image galleries (WP:gallery). But I only added one image. For a building, it's helpful to see it from several perspectives. BMK is concerned a stub article should not have too many images, but to me, adding content, text or images, to a stub makes it less of a stub and is beneficial, within reason (keeping in mind the guidelines on image galleries). Three images of a building, including one in the infobox, does not seem like a large number to me. BMK's other concern is that we should not "PRESENT IMAGES THAT THE READER *MUST* CLICK THROUGH IN ORDER TO SEE". This one was very odd to me. It is standard practice to render images as thumbnails, which can be clicked on to see a larger version. Is a thumbnail not able to be seen? I nevertheless tried to accommodate BMK by increasing the height of the thumb a little, but BMK still couldn't abide. It's BMK's way or the highway.

This leads me to think I am dancing around the real issue. It was BMK who had reformatted the image placement to its current state. While I was nonchalantly trying to improve a short article, I had not realized the tremendous emotional investment BMK has placed in this stub, nor the injury inflicted by deigning to modify his or her work. In reviewing BMK's edits from May 9-10, you will notice BMK cannot accommodate anything I try to do, going so far as to restore dead links that I corrected. It doesn't matter what I do, so great is the affront, it must be reverted. And people wonder why Wikipedia has trouble retaining editors. Fletcher (talk) 20:53, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

What are you, a first year psychology student? They often understand everything there is to know about human psychology ... or think they do.

Listen, Fletcher, I've got 3,664 articles on my watchlist, a large majority of which I've added images to, reformatted images, fixed layouts, and so on. Do you really think I have some kind of emotional investment in some shitty little barely-bigger-than-a-stub article about a downtown high-rsie hotel? Well, of course, you'd know better, being on the outside with no information or insight, while I'm just on the inside knowing what my intentions are, but I think I'm going to call your bluff anyway.

As I may have mentioned, this is a shitty-little-barely-larger-than-a-stub article. It really only needs one image, in the infobox, but I relented on the second image because, unlike the ground-level image, it gives a much clearer view of the building's architecture. If I was choosing one photograph to put in the article, it would be that one. Unfortunately, it's a long, thin photograph that needs some space in order to be presented so that the reader can see it, and if it was in the infobox, it would make the box incredibly long, especially for such a short article. Therefore I found a way to shoehorn it in without extending the length of the article.

Now comes Fletcher, who for some unknown reason, thinks it's necessary to have three images in a shitty-little-barely-larger-than-a-stub article, so he throws both of the tall images in a gallery, but, of course, he can't get them large enough to be seen by the reader, because the building is so fucking tall that the article would be (again) incredible long -- so he puts them in at small sizes. Unfortunately, one of the basic principles of images presentation is that images should be presented at a size that allows the reader to see their content easily, and not be required to "click-through" in order to see them. If the reader wants to click-through, that's fine, but we should never require them to do so just to see what the photograph is presenting. From this perspective, Fletcher was never going to be able to present those two images in a gallery at a size that makes any functional sense.

When you add that to the fact that Wikipedia is not, essentially, a gallery of images, and that the article has a link to the Commons gallery, where interested readers can see more images if they want to, there remains absolutely no excuse for Fletcher's attempt to overwhelm a shitty-little-barely-larger-than-a-stub article with unnecessary images, unless he just enjoys being disruptive for the sake of being disruptive.

I would suggest that the article is just fine the way it is. If there's a consensus to remove the second image, I don't think I would object to that much at all, but, certainly, there is no reason on God's green earth that this you-know-what-article needs another image. I would suggest that Fletcher cease his attempts at sticking in additional images and, at the very least, wait until he's got a few more years of Psych under his belt before he tries to look under the hood of other editors and explain their behavior in terms that he truly doesn't grok. BMK (talk) 03:18, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Incidentally, the next time you want another editor to treat you civilly and collegially, don't act like a shithead when you present your argument. If you don't, you're more likely to be met with calm and reasonable discussion rather than a buzzsaw. All you had to do is present the reason or reasons you thought the article needed a third image, but instead you chose to take a puerile hit at me. So... you made the choice, you set the ground rules. BMK (talk) 03:21, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

No one is likely to be met with calm and reasonable discussion from you, as you have been rude and confrontational from the outset, and all over a simple stub article that should not engender strong emotions. When you start shouting commands in edit summaries in capital letters, it doesn't bode well for civil discourse. And given the rant above, I think you're right that I need far more education before I could grasp how you have fallen into such a sad, angry hell, much less what could be done about it. Keep refreshing that watchlist with its thousands of items and maybe you won't have to think about it. In any case, I submit the closest approximation to consensus is to remove the tall image, which is cropped to such a narrow aspect ratio it's going to be hard to place, and as you note readers can view it on Commons. (There was no link, but I've added one.) Fletcher (talk) 02:52, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Adding the link: well done; the rest: not so much. You're not nearly as insightful as you appear to believe you are. BMK (talk) 03:12, 12 May 2015 (UTC)