Charles Sanders Peirce, Who Trashes My Steels Options

[Jonny Cache]

Can someone explain to me why anyone would want to own this article so badly? I dabble in philosophy-land and I had never heard of this guy before this controversy.

I think it goes something like this:

• The article was started by people with ordinary but superficial understanding of the subject.
• One or more well informed and insightful editors improved the article, including material beyond the immediate understanding of previous editors.
• These improvements triggered alarm bells (false positives) among ignorant admins utterly lacking the requisite understanding but fully vested with authority to impose their shallow understanding.
• The better informed and insightful editors resisted this "institutional vandalism."
• The ignorant admins enlisted the assistance of more powerful admins in the dysfunctional networking community.
• The better informed and insightful editors continued to resist to the best of their abilities.
• The article has become a vehicle of displaying power and influence of actors in the dysfunctional community by exercising suppression of the better informed and enlighten editors and substituting acronyms and phony processes for reasoned discourse.

That is a pretty good list of factors that one sees in play all throughout the more specialized subject matters in Wikipedia. But there are two sorts of factors that I think are still missing from a full account of the action.

• The first sort of thing has to do with the additional historical details of what happened — both on the CSP article and on several other articles, both before and after the period that we have sampled so far — that will need to be examined.
• The other sort of thing has to do with the requisite dynamics that is driving the time devolution of Wikipedia all across its global front.

There is a kind of Dyadic Unspoken Social Contract (DUSC) between the WikiΦührer and the WikiΦolger that needs to be articulated, brought into the light, and deconstructed.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 19th September 2007, 8:28pm

[Kato]

Can someone explain to me why anyone would want to own this article so badly? I dabble in philosophy-land and I had never heard of this guy before this controversy.

I think it goes something like this:

• The article was started by people with ordinary but superficial understanding of the subject.
• One or more well informed and insightful editors improved the article, including material beyond the immediate understanding of previous editors.
• These improvements triggered alarm bells (false positives) among ignorant admins utterly lacking the requisite understanding but fully vested with authority to impose their shallow understanding.
• The better informed and insightful editors resisted this "institutional vandalism."
• The ignorant admins enlisted the assistance of more powerful admins in the dysfunctional networking community.
• The better informed and insightful editors continued to resist to the best of their abilities.
• The article has become a vehicle of displaying power and influence of actors in the dysfunctional community by exercising suppression of the better informed and enlighten editors and substituting acronyms and phony processes for reasoned discourse.

That's a damn good post, Bead. I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the oddness that surrounds the Peirce article, but it sure explains a lot of problems throughout the site.

[Jonny Cache]

Can someone explain to me why anyone would want to own this article so badly? I dabble in philosophy-land and I had never heard of this guy before this controversy.

I think it goes something like this:

• The article was started by people with ordinary but superficial understanding of the subject.
• One or more well informed and insightful editors improved the article, including material beyond the immediate understanding of previous editors.
• These improvements triggered alarm bells (false positives) among ignorant admins utterly lacking the requisite understanding but fully vested with authority to impose their shallow understanding.
• The better informed and insightful editors resisted this "institutional vandalism."
• The ignorant admins enlisted the assistance of more powerful admins in the dysfunctional networking community.
• The better informed and insightful editors continued to resist to the best of their abilities.
• The article has become a vehicle of displaying power and influence of actors in the dysfunctional community by exercising suppression of the better informed and enlighten editors and substituting acronyms and phony processes for reasoned discourse.

That's a pretty good list of factors that one sees in play all throughout the more specialized subject matters in Wikipedia. But there are two sorts of factors that I think are still missing from a full account of the action.

• The first sort of thing has to do with the additional historical details of what happened — both on the CSP article and on several other articles, both before and after the period that we have sampled so far — that will need to be examined.
• The other sort of thing has to do with the requisite dynamics that is driving the time devolution of Wikipedia all across its global front.

There is a kind of Dyadic Unspoken Social Contract (DUSC) between the WikiΦührer and the WikiΦolger that needs to be articulated, brought into the light, and deconstructed.

Jonny

A few more rounds before I hang up my guns for the day …

"The article was started by people with ordinary but superficial understanding of the subject."

Close enough. I have looked at the history of the article from its very first edits. A lot of them were by people who spelled his last name "Pierce" and thought his middle name was "Saunders" — most of them got the "Charles" part okay. There was even a mild bit of grousing about the merge from Charles Saunders Peirce that left its traces in the corresponding talk page.

Okay, there is a notorious case of an old book on Peirce by a German publisher where they spelled his middle name "Saunders" — it may have been just a bookbinder's error on the cover, I can't recall, it was 40 years ago that I read it. If the luck of the draw was that you knew only this one book on Peirce, then that would account for it. But all of these issues are the marks of rank noobism when it comes to Peirce studies.

At some point they slurped up a very short, mostly biographical Nupedia article on Peirce by Jaime Nubiola, a noted Peirce scholar.

Damn! I hate historiography with a positively palpable passion!

G'nite for now …

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Thu 20th September 2007, 3:45am

[papaya]

May I be blunt, Mr. Aubrey? If your editing in that article was anything like your writing here, I can't blame anyone for reverting the daylights out of what you wrote. SV's mongo revert was excessive and vindictive of course, and I can only admire The Tetrast's patience in not appearing here in a cloud of greasy black smoke to bitch about it.

[GlassBeadGame]

May I be blunt, Mr. Aubrey? If your editing in that article was anything like your writing here, I can't blame anyone for reverting the daylights out of what you wrote. SV's mongo revert was excessive and vindictive of course, and I can only admire The Tetrast's patience in not appearing here in a cloud of greasy black smoke to bitch about it.

Of course Jonny Cache's and Jon Awbrey's (please note the spelling) writing styles are completely different, serving entirely different purposes. I'm certain JC would direct you to a careful consideration of the diffs for the rest of the story.

[Jonny Cache]

May I be blunt, Mr. Aubrey? If your editing in that article was anything like your writing here, I can't blame anyone for reverting the daylights out of what you wrote. SV's mongo revert was excessive and vindictive of course, and I can only admire The Tetrast's patience in not appearing here in a cloud of greasy black smoke to bitch about it.

Jon Awbrey, {{distinguish2|[[John Aubrey]], the author of ''[[Brief Lives]]''}}, knows the diff between Riting 4 Φun and udder-wise. If you need egg-samples of peeple who dont, there's a place 4 that.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Thu 20th September 2007, 6:04pm

[Jonny Cache]

And heeeeere's Jonny —

May I be blunt, Mr. Aubrey?

Sure you may, but aren't you glad there's a pill for that !?

Jonny

[Jonny Cache]

May I be blunt, Mr. Aubrey? If your editing in that article was anything like your writing here, I can't blame anyone for reverting the daylights out of what you wrote. SV's mongo revert was excessive and vindictive of course, and I can only admire The Tetrast's patience in not appearing here in a cloud of greasy black smoke to bitch about it.

Jon Awbrey, {{distinguish2|[[John Aubrey]], the author of ''[[Brief Lives]]''}}, knows the diff between Riting 4 Φun and udder-wise. If you need egg-samples of peeple who dont, there's a place 4 that.

Jon Awbrey

Papaya,

Let me now try to give a more reflective response to your remarks.

When it comes to any kind of Question that a person might ask, there are at first cut just three (3) different kinds of people in this world:

1. The Good. People who want to know the truth, in other words, to know what's knowable with regard to that Question.
2. The Indifferent. People who don't really care one way or the other about the truth of the matter.
3. The Bad. People who want to hide the truth and to prevent others from finding it out.

As a general rule, it is usually a waste of time and energy trying to develop information about the Question in question with companions operating under the characteristics of N° 2 and N° 3 — not that it ever stops us from trying, at least, not until we have inched well past the shadow of a doubt about what kind of interest they have in the Question.

To be continued …

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sat 22nd September 2007, 2:58pm

[Jonny Cache]

Current Narrative —

It looks like I may have a few calm hours to work on my Perils of Peirce in Wikiputia chronology.

No doubt you find yourself wondering — Why in the devil such a sudden surge of pernicious paramilitary puppet piranhas descending on such an out of the way outpost as the article on Charles Sanders Peirce?

Indeed.

But like a lot of wars that begin in one place and then suddenly shift to another theatre for their climactic scenes, and for no apparent reason that anyone can figure but the convenience of serving some hidden agenda of theatre managers or some ulterior motive of not-so-angelic impressarios, the Puppet War on the CSP Front really had its roots in another bit of turf, to wit, or not, the Wikipedia article on … wait 4 it … wait 4 it … Truth.

Magic Theatre … Entrance Not For Everyone … For Madmen Only

Truth : The First Casualty

1. …

Revisionary History of Critical Diffs in the Puppet War on the CSP Article —

1. Revision as of 10:59, 06 Jun 2006 by Epistemologist
   — Enter Puppet 1
2. Revision as of 02:20, 08 Jun 2006 by AnnMBake
   — Enter Puppet 2
3. Revision as of 19:41, 10 Jun 2006 by Blainster
   — Blainster restores the initial edit of Puppet 1, despite much discussion on talk page about its inaccuracies, perhaps by way of encouraging a "newbie"
4. Revision as of 23:51, 10 Jun 2006 by LogicMan
   — Enter Puppet 3
5. Revision as of 01:49, 11 Jun 2006 by Wylie Ali
   — Enter Puppet 4
6. Revision as of 08:12, 12 Jun 2006 by MengTheMagnificent
   — Enter Puppet 5
7. Revision as of 08:13, 12 Jun 2006 by MengTheMagnificent
   — Last Non-Anonymous Puppet Edit
8. ∑Δ 11:24, 04 Jun 2006, Jon Awbrey → 08:13, 12 Jun 2006, MengTheMagnificent
   — Sum of the Diffs over the Course of the Six Day Puppet War. All told there were 44 edits, reducing the article length from 78 kb to 51 kb, a difference of 27 kb.
9. Revision as of 15:22, 16 Jun 2006 by Jon Awbrey
   — The Restoration : An Era Of Reconstruction Begins
10. ∑Δ 15:22, 16 Jun 2006, Jon Awbrey → 19:20, 06 Sep 2006, Jon Awbrey
    — Sum of the Diffs over the Remainder of the Summer. All told there were 122 edits, mostly clarification and cleanup work except for the deletion of the Comparison with Leibniz. Article length went from 78 kb to 80 kb, a difference of +2 kb.

Archived Discussion of the Sockpuppet Issue —

1. Comment of 14:39, 12 Jun 2006 by FranksValli
   — Initial Sockpuppet Alert.
2. Last Week I Couldn't Even Spell CONCENSUS
3. Voting, and Limits on the Power of Consensus

Incidental Skirmishes —

1. Revision as of 01:01, 17 Jun 2006 by 67.168.70.83
   — Enter Puppet 6 (Anonymous IP of Nathan Ladd)
2. Revisions of 06–08 Sep 2006
   — Serial obscene vandalism from 3 different Anonymous IP's the day after JA is blocked, Doc Glasgow is totally taken in by the usual Dick-&-Cover, reverting only the last and more innocuous of the series.

All Quiet On The Persian Front … Until …

1. Revision as of 11:47, 14 Jan 2007, by 24.16.98.241
   — Enter Puppet 7 (Anonymous IP of Nathan Ladd). The gross ignorance of NL's opinions on Peirce is evident to all who bother to read what Peirce wrote instead of sticking to the half-baked Pop Phil, secondary, and tertiary sources that NL reads. Here, NL persists in re-seeding the very same errors that he insisted on disseminating through a host of other Peirce-related articles and sections over the preceding 3 years.
2. Revision as of 11:49, 14 Jan 2007 by 24.16.98.241
   — Mass deletion of text by Puppet 7 (Anonymous IP of Nathan Ladd). Reason? He No Like.
3. Revision as of 07:18, 18 Jan 2007 by 24.16.98.241
   — Another edit by Puppet 7 (Anonymous IP of Nathan Ladd).
4. Revision as of 09:54, 10 Mar 2007 by SlimVirgin
   — SlimVirgin reverts 3 months worth of work by many editors based on mere charges of sockpuppet edits, later proven false.
5. Revision as of 04:09, 11 Mar 2007
   — SlimVirgin tags The Tetrast as a sockpuppet of Jon Awbrey.

To be continued …

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Fri 28th September 2007, 3:02pm

[Jonny Cache]

Speaking of Wikiparanoia, Slrubenstein deletes a nicely illustrated little article on the Semiotic Triangle by what I knew to be an extremely friendly and modest editor who contacted me one or twice asking for references to the literature. Now, anyone who knows my work on Wikipedia knows that I never got around to working up anything but ASCII Graphics for the articles I created. It appears that any contact with a Wikipariah is the very kiss of death in that OhSoPhreaking AGF and Civil So-Called Community. Shoot first and serve the warrant later — that's the Wikipediot way.

Jon Awbrey

[Castle Rock]

Speaking of Wikiparanoia, Slrubenstein deletes a nicely illustrated little article on the Semiotic Triangle by what I knew to be an extremely friendly and modest editor who contacted me one or twice asking for references to the literature. Now, anyone who knows my work on Wikipedia knows that I never got around to working up anything but ASCII Graphics for the articles I created. It appears that any contact with a Wikipariah is the very kiss of death in that OhSoPhreaking AGF and Civil So-Called Community. Shoot first and serve the warrant later — that's the Wikipediot way.

Jon Awbrey

What an idiot. He's of the BADSITES crowd too isn't he?

[Jonny Cache]

Speaking of Wikiparanoia, Slrubenstein deletes a nicely illustrated little article on the Semiotic Triangle by what I knew to be an extremely friendly and modest editor who contacted me one or twice asking for references to the literature. Now, anyone who knows my work on Wikipedia knows that I never got around to working up anything but ASCII Graphics for the articles I created. It appears that any contact with a Wikipariah is the very kiss of death in that OhSoPhreaking AGF and Civil So-Called Community. Shoot first and serve the warrant later — that's the Wikipediot way.

Jon Awbrey

What an idiot. He's of the BADSITES crowd too isn't he?

Strictly speaking, Wikipedia is mostly a BANSITE these days, except when it gets in High Gyre and becomes a BANSHEESITE, but I think that it's probably safe to call it a BADSITE, too, maybe even an UGLYSITE, and of course we have recently heard the story of how it grew from nothing but a glom in the eye of @TACOSITE, so maybe that would explain how it became such a BEANSINTHEIREARSITE.

Be careful how you parse that …

Jonny

[Jonny Cache]

Semiotics got a mention on The Big Bang Theory tonight.

The Thirdness Millennium Has Arrived, Only Seven Years Late !!!

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 23rd October 2007, 2:20am

[Jonny Cache]

Just a few bits of minor news to report on the Pers-ian front. Ben Udell has been doing a lot of nice work on the CSP and CSP BIB articles. No two Persians agree about everything, but at least his able biblesitting will keep the worst howlers off the top of the Search Engine Offal (SEO) that we all know and loathe, and that takes a load off my shudders when it comes to keeping watch over that. I do wish he'd learn to read edit histories, though, as he seems to be labouring under the absurdly bee-knighted impression that SlimVirgin did him some kind of favour, when it was she who reverted 3 months worth of his earlier contributions and branded him and blocked him as a puppet of me in the first place!

Oh well, you can't have everything …

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 31st October 2007, 5:42pm

[Kato]

Indeed. There's a genuine sense of relief when you check an article you've worked hard at but have given up on to find that someone else is saving the material in your absence. I've had to stop checking some of my best articles, a few of which took me many months to compile. I know that if I even glance at them now I'll be filled with a terrible need to re-enter that horrible place out of a sense of moral duty. Such is the awful pull of Der Jimbo's grand folly.

As I have written elsewhere, one such article which I considered I personal triumph of the will is now so badly vandalised I actually had to laugh. Bits of it were in a different language, comically stolen from another Wikipedia, and it had a template added by one wag taken from WP's internal structure appearing mid-sentence!

[Jonny Cache]

Indeed. There's a genuine sense of relief when you check an article you've worked hard at but have given up on to find that someone else is saving the material in your absence. I've had to stop checking some of my best articles, a few of which took me many months to compile. I know that if I even glance at them now I'll be filled with a terrible need to re-enter that horrible place out of a sense of moral duty. Such is the awful pull of Der Jimbo's grand folly.

As I have written elsewhere, one such article which I considered I personal triumph of the will is now so badly vandalised I actually had to laugh. Bits of it were in a different language, comically stolen from another Wikipedia, and it had a template added by one wag taken from WP's internal structure appearing mid-sentence!

Here's a tip. When you have articles that you created and did most of the work on up to a certain version, then you can fork that version over to Centiare. If you want to maintain your own point of view on the subject, then you can fork it over to your very own directory space. If you want to leave it open for future collaboration, then you can fork it over to the main space. Even articles that you didn't do all the significant work on can still be forked over to the main space under GFDL. Of course, you can always put your own original work in your own directory space any time you want. It's the best of all possible worlds.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 31st October 2007, 5:15pm

[guy]

You can also copy it to Wikinfo.

[Kato]

SV's mongo revert was excessive and vindictive of course, and I can only admire The Tetrast's patience in not appearing here in a cloud of greasy black smoke to bitch about it.

The mongo revert?

That'll be a generic unthinking blind revert to a previous version motivated by winning a game against the other editor rather than improving the article. Yeap. That's about as good a description of that sweeping Bishop takes pawn opening move as I can think of.

Jonny discusses the motions of SlimVirgin's castling manoeuvre on one thread if I recall, a careful switching of key material behind a wall of innocuous pawn edits, all completed in one move when nobody is really watching the board.

[Jonny Cache]

Indeed. There's a genuine sense of relief when you check an article you've worked hard at but have given up on to find that someone else is saving the material in your absence. I've had to stop checking some of my best articles, a few of which took me many months to compile. I know that if I even glance at them now I'll be filled with a terrible need to re-enter that horrible place out of a sense of moral duty. Such is the awful pull of Der Jimbo's grand folly.

As I have written elsewhere, one such article which I considered I personal triumph of the will is now so badly vandalised I actually had to laugh. Bits of it were in a different language, comically stolen from another Wikipedia, and it had a template added by one wag taken from WP's internal structure appearing mid-sentence!

Here's a tip. When you have articles that you created and did most of the work on up to a certain version, then you can fork that version over to Centiare. If you want to maintain your own point of view on the subject, then you can fork it over to your very own directory space. If you want to leave it open for future collaboration, then you can fork it over to the main space. Even articles that you didn't do all the significant work on can still be forked over to the main space under GFDL. Of course, you can always put your own original work in your own directory space any time you want. It's the best of all possible worlds.

Jon Awbrey

And let me add to this incid.net.tle consideration the fact that Centiare provides the sorts of tools that it takes to bump WP:OFFAL off the top of our Search Engine Offerrings. For example, in the months since I've been transporting my portfolio to Centiare I've been able to edge my Centiare pages within a hair's breadth of the WP:DEFAMATIONS that Google conspires in uttering and publishing to the world about me.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Fri 2nd November 2007, 3:24pm

[Jonny Cache]

This brief note is intended to answer a question that Ben Udell raised on the Peirce List about a problematic passage in the current Wikipedia article on Charles Sanders Peirce.

The problematic passage is as follows —

Unlike the other pragmatists, Peirce never explicitly advanced a theory of truth. But his scattered comments about truth have proved influential to several epistemic truth theorists, and as a useful foil for deflationary and correspondence theories of truth.

Source. Wikipedia, Charles Peirce#Pragmatism

Farmer Kiss corrected the more serious problems in this passage, largely by deleting the incorrect statements, with this edit.

As with many other errors that still bedevil the current version of the article, the problematic passage was re-introduced by SlimVirgin when she reverted three months worth of collective work on the article at this point.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 4th December 2007, 7:18am