I'm Re-view-ing the Sit-u-a-tion …'Cause there's something fishy goin' on here — my nose tells me that much — and just because I don't know what it is yet — especially because I don't know what it is yet — it is necessary to speculate on the various sorts of games that might be in the mix.
So I want to extract a generic theme that arose in another line of inquiry, and abstract it from the specifics of that particular case, because I think there's a bigger picture, however dimly lit, to keep in sight here.
I started thinking along these lines a few weeks back when I saw yet another story on the local news about some Senior Citizen of the Griftedest Generation who sent $20,000 in cold hard cash by Featheral Xpress to some address in Phoenix because some guy on the phone said she had won $10 million from Publishers' Shearinghouse, and, like she said, "But he sounded so convincing on the phone". I was right in the middle of exclaiming —
Wow !!! Just how gullible can some folks be !? — when I reflected for a moment on how much of my time and effort I had been conned into x-spending on Wikipedia, all for the sake of a really good line.
Since that time I've been contemplating the ways that the Wikipedia-Citizendium game seems very much like some kind of Intellectual Pyramid Scheme. A couple of distinguishing marks — if you'll excuse the expression — of a long-lasting pyramid scheme are these: (1) a steady influx of newbies who have yet to tumble to the game, and (2) a mechanism to efflux from the system and to render harmless the marks who have started to ask too many questions.
Jonny (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)
A Very Shiny Glossary — Terms of Artful DodgeryThis post has been edited by Jonny Cache:
Confidence Games & Pyramid Schemes, There's One Born Every Nanosecond
Jonny Cache Confidence Games & Pyramid Schemes 
