The WikiPedia Medium Is The WikiPedia Massage, What Is The Real Purpose Of The WikiProgramme? Options

[Jonny Cache]

Picking up on one of Kato's «Key Questions» and generalizing another:

• What is the root problem in Wikipedia?
• What do all of these episodes we keep watching have in common?

I suggest that the answer will come from pursuing the question:

What is the real purpose of those who control Wikipedia?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think we have to watch every last episode of the Wikipediot Soap Opera, much less every spin-off like Citzendium, ConservaToryPedia, VergoPedia, AdNauseaPedia that comes down the WikiPike in order to figure out the answer to this question once and for all.

So permit me to extract my most recent mini-manifesto on this score from the pages of the Soap Opera Digest (SOD) � where it is likely to get buried beneath the fray of WhoScrewedWhoToday � and reprint it here.

I keep trying to share what clues I've gathered, but folks at The Wikipedia Review are as just as blind as folks at Wikipedia and all the clueless InterNeuts in the Wowie-Zowie-Web-O-Sphere.

Maybe folks didn't read the same books My Generation did in school and college. The scenario was laid out clearly enough in all of those Prophetically Dystopian novels of my childhood, and the basic principles of media dynamics that are involved in Wikipediac Devolution were all laid out by Marshall McLuhan so long ago that they passed from Archetype to Cliche when I was an Undergrub, and apparently into Oblivion now.

You all keep being distracted by one damn Message after another when you ought to be looking at the kind of Medium that is being so craftily crafted under your very noses.

For example, people on all sides waste so gawdawful much time trying to figure out what side the Cabal is on � when it comes to this or that economic, political, religious, or scientific tiff.

The Cabal is not on any side but the Cabal's side.

Sure, maybe the Cabal is taking the side of North-North-West Eurasia today, but it can just as easily shift to taking the side of Southerly Eurasia any time that it becomes convenient to do so.

What does that mean for the Media Operating Characteristic (MOC) that will selected as their Most Favoured MOC?

It means that their Most Favoured MOC cannot allow itself to get phase-locked forever into any one POV. More precisely, it must be agile enough to shift its phase 180° in a period of time just ε-greater than the modal attention span of the viewing public.

How long is that?

Your Mullage May Vary, but if we look at the US case in the last Dubya-Dubya Police Action, the US media were reporting on the Future Sea Battle for just about 6 months before it started to look downright silly not to go ahead and have it.

Six months is not exactly turning on a dime, and I think that the Powers That Bee are probably trying to get that down to a temporal turning radius ≤ 6 weeks.

For now …

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

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Saltimbanco]

If I understand you, Jonny, I don't think I agree.

We might divide information into two types: immediate information and background information. These appellations are almost self-explanatory, but I'll give an example just to be clear: immediate information would be something like a radio/television/newspaper report that the US is invading some country; background information would be the context in which this happens, which would include encyclopedia entries on the regions and any ongoing tensions therein, as well as scholarly (and non-scholarly) books and articles going into more depth on these matters. While Wikipedia is apparently pretty good at efficiently collecting breaking, 'immediate information' news on a given matter in one place, I suspect that its utility as a tool for controlling information of this sort is very limited: most people learn about such matters from their radio/television/newspaper, accept whatever they find out from these sources and think no further on the matter. Not many people hear that Liza Minelli collapsed on stage and rush to Wikipedia to get something close to real-time updates from almost all possible news sources on exactly what happened. Nor would many people do anything similar on any other immediate news item.

Background information, however, is a different matter. Mostly, people don't research this, either. But a few do, and these people influence the opinions of other people. If I happen to have taken an interest in Liza Minelli's life, I might be able to drop the remark that perhaps her collapsing on stage recently is related to the dizziness that she has reported experiencing for several years (I'm making this up, and I have no reason to believe that Ms. Minelli has experienced any more dizziness than anyone else). And memes like this take on a life of their own; before long there would be a web of self-important sentiment centered around me that is pretty sure that Liza Minelli's recent collapse is related to her chronic dizziness.

And for that sort of information, people do (sadly) refer to Wikipedia, although it would be nice - hopefully Google will do it with their service - if numbers of views for individual pages were disclosed. (This would probably be bad for business for Wikipedia: why spend countless hours documenting that capital punishment really does reduce violent crime, and edit-warring with those who want to stifle such information, if only 17 people a month view the article, including 4 who are actively editing it?)

But background information doesn't seem to be what you have written about, unless you are thinking in terms of an unachievable ideal: people do not abandon or refresh their background information frequently, if they even do it at all. I took a class on the US Military System twenty years ago, and I have not since updated my understanding that the Army's underlying philosophy comes mostly from Clausewitz; the Navy's mostly from Mahan; and the Air Force's mostly from Douhet.

Moreover, I think that if Wikipedia or any other medium endeavored to flip-flop people's background knowledge, it would mostly come off as flakey and unreliable ... which maybe goes more toward demonstrating that that really is what the Wikipedia powers that be have tried to do, but still ...

So have I read you incorrectly?

I had been thinking, by the way, that it might serve to define as precisely as possible what it is that the Wikipedia powers do that we believe does not serve a 'legitimate' purpose: an alternative hypothesis is that Linda Mack bans scores of people because that is pretty much what the legitimate purpose of creating a useful online encyclopedia requires.

[Jonny Cache]

… and flowers never bend …

But background information doesn't seem to be what you have written about, unless you are thinking in terms of an unachievable ideal: people do not abandon or refresh their background information frequently, if they even do it at all. I took a class on the US Military System twenty years ago, and I have not since updated my understanding that the Army's underlying philosophy comes mostly from Clausewitz; the Navy's mostly from Mahan; and the Air Force's mostly from Douhet.

You seem to be equivocating the term «Background Information» at this point.

• There is the sort of background information that our Model Readers already have and that they are content to maintain in the style to which they are currently accustomed. In that case they are hardly to be found actively seeking more.
• There is the sort of background information that our Model Readers do not already have in sufficient breadth or depth to be content with it, that they are therefore seeking to increase, and that they may reasonably expect that other sources have already accumulated.

It is of course the latter class of Model Inquirer that a knowledge resource is designed to serve.

Moreover, I think that if Wikipedia or any other medium endeavored to flip-flop people's background knowledge, it would mostly come off as flakey and unreliable … which maybe goes more toward demonstrating that that really is what the Wikipedia powers that be have tried to do, but still …

Exactly. In my experience with Wikipedia, that is precisely one of the reasons why people who do have the relevant background knowledge in a given subject area judge Wikipedia to be so utterly "Flakey And Unreliable" (FAU).

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Saltimbanco]

You seem to be equivocating the term «Background Information» at this point.

• There is the sort of background information that our Model Readers already have and that they are content to maintain in the style to which they are currently accustomed. In that case they are hardly to be found actively seeking more.
• There is the sort of background information that our Model Readers do not already have in sufficient breadth or depth to be content with it, that they are therefore seeking to increase, and that they may reasonably expect that other sources have already accumulated.

It is of course the latter class of Model Inquirer that a knowledge resource is designed to serve.

The main distinction in your bifurcation seems to be in having or not having. I'm not convinced that this is a worthwhile distinction to make, at least not for a purpose that I recognize in what you have written.

It might be worthwhile for me to back up and elaborate on what I mean by 'background information.' 'Background information' is a set of broadly mutually reinforcing beliefs, all of which are accepted as true, and in the context of which any new information is considered. That it is all accepted as true and that it is all broadly mutually reinforcing is what makes it difficult to change.

Given my definition above of background information, it doesn't make much sense to consider background information that one does not have; information only becomes background information based on the manner in which one "has" it, and newly acquired information may or may not become background information.

What is wanted, toward the end of controlling people's beliefs, is to control the information they get in instances in which they decide that their background information on a particular matter is lacking, and they undertake to acquire more information on the matter, perhaps to incorporate it into their background information.

So, someone might decide that he really doesn't have enough background information to make sense of the debate in the US about universal health care. He goes out to learn more. Depending upon where he goes, he might encounter the memes that more than 2% of US GDP is spent on health care paper work; that 16% of the US population has no health insurance; that government-run programs are always less efficient than the free market; etc. He could very easily acquire background information that convinces him of two opposite beliefs: that universal health care would improve life in the US; or that it would make it worse. And then, so armed, he will decide that Presidential candidates advocating universal health care are either honest, responsible politicians for doing so, or that they are villains of some sort. But really, there is no inherent difference between the type of information that becomes background information and that which does not.

Surely I'm droning on too long at this point.