Unintended Consequences Of The Community Metaphor, Internet Websites Are Not Sovereign Nations � Duh !!! Options

[Jonny Cache]

This was the title of a discussion point that I tried to raise with Larry Sanger and the Citizendians back in the days when their neverending Constitutional Convention was just a toddler in short pants.

But the issue is a perennial one in this Brave Nøøb World of the Wikisphere, and it has flared up once again with the advent of a number of new-fanged lawgifts that those geeks in the Woolen Hearse known as Wikipedia have come abearing.

So I think the time has come to air a mix of old and new tunes on this old song and dance routine.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jon Awbrey]

Those are good observations, but I don't expect mainscream Wikipediots will ever own up to the make-believe character of the game they're playing. Pretending that a pretend-encyclopedia is a real encyclopedia involves pretending that pretend-editors are real editors � so I don't see an end to their pretends on that score � but what compels them to pretend that a pretend-community is a real community, since a non-trivial notion of genuine community is not implied by the nature of a publishing enterprise?

And remember that I raised these issues at the upstarting of Citizendium, where I once had hopes of a project informed by the lessons of Wikipedia's mistakes, and where there was supposed to be a practice of relating internal properties and imputations to external qualities and reputations. But even there the compulsion to specious role-playing was just too great.

I think this overwhelming desire to hide or lose oneself in make-believe calls for further explanation.

Jon Awbrey