Of Amateurs And Amateur-AstersEssay 1QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Tue 2nd October 2007, 11:24pm)
I confess that I have read only snippets of what Dawkins and Keen have said about amateurism in Wikipedia, but just from that sample there is something about it that doesn't quite ring true.
I think that it's this. Amateurs are not the dominant force in Wikipedia — amateurs are people who engage in a skilled activity for the pure love of doing it. I am such an amateur in many areas that I've studied as an avocation for decades, but my love of the subject draws me on to learn ever more about it, even when I can't get paid for it. I don't see many people like that in Wikipedia. At any rate, true amateurs like that seem to end up as the same kind of road-kill as experts and professionals, the common factor being that they are people who genuinely care about their chosen subjects.
There is some other motive that drives the dominant culture in Wikipedia that has nothing to do with loving a given subject area. There are those who evidently love exerting their will to power over a topic that they neither know nor love for its own sake. There are those who get their jollies from bashing another person over the head. But I do not count that as being the same thing at all.
What Wikipedia has spawned is a whole new species of sub-amateurs, even anti-amateurs. They are fighters not lovers.
And it shows …
Jonny (IMG:
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sun 6th April 2008, 9:46pm)
That whole bit about the Cult Of The Amateur (COTA) has always been a mis-diagnosis of What's Wrong With Wikipedia (WWWW). Amateurs are, by definition and etymology, people who pursue a skilled activity purely for the love of doing it — those of you who are old enough to remember when the Olympics were for amateurs may know what I mean. Nothing about being an amateur says that you have to be an abject klutz at what you do, or despise people adept and lucky enough to get paid for doing it, or envy those with more experience and skill so badly that you refuse to learn what they know, or obstruct people from contributing in areas that you never bothered to learn about.
No, Wikipedia is the Cult Of The Incompetent (COTI), and the only way they know to make themselves feel better about their own dim place in the Sum Of Knowledge is by banning those who might teach them something.
Jon (IMG:
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What can I say — grate minds think alike.
Jon (IMG:
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