A Scientific Dissent from Wikipedianism, A Crockwork Orange Options

[Derktar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adm...er:Orangemarlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=210232016
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=210231458

I don't know - we have an active contributor to Wikipedia Review apparently editing on behalf of another Wikipedia Review editor (who happens to be a permabanned editor). Not too big a leap at all... Guettarda (talk) 03:59, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

That's right folks, I forgot to mention we re-programmed Krimpet a week or so ago and we are finally putting her to use.

So sorry you had to wander into that mess Krimpet.

[Moulton]

The collegial and congenial Dr. Filll analyzes Moulton's Objectives...

Your objectives

I guarantee if you do not agree to follow the rules and take instruction in how to behave here, you will have the same experience you did the last time. You might even be shown the door quicker.

I know you want to "improve" the system, according to your own intuition and undestanding. My interpretation is that you want to dictate rules to tens of thousands of other users, based on nothing besides the fact that you are Moulton. That is not how a collaborative, consensus-driven enterprise like Wikipedia works. The fact that you even believe it is possible when you do not understand the system is mind-boggling, and shows you are not much of a "scientist" or "researcher" at all.

If you want to try to improve the system (as I and many others do), you have to understand it first. And you will not understand it by sitting over at WR and throwing stones at Wikipedia with other malcontents. And you will not understand the system by demanding that you be allowed to disobey all the policies and practices and conventions, and to insult others at will who are only trying to follow the rules, and do so with impunity and no consequences.

I would suggest that you do what I did; pick some very bland topics you are interested in, like the theatre, or some playwrite, or chess, or Arabic poetry and build up a few FA and GA articles over a few months. Get at least 20,000 edits under your belt, and write a good 100 articles or more.

Then try a controversial article in an area in which you are not personally involved, like "race and IQ" or "chiropractic" or "electronic voice phenomenon". Get at least 500 edits on the talk page of a controversial article trying to broker a consensus between warring factions and get the article closer to the standards that Wikipedia aspires to (not your standards, but Wikipedia's).

Put some time in closing threads at the COI noticeboard or a few other noticeboards.

Then and only then will you have enough background to begin suggesting changes to Wikipedia's culture. Then and only then will you understand enough for your statements on improving Wikipedia to make any sense. Then and only then will anyone pay attention to you at all, and even then you will mostly be ignored.

That is reality. Deal with it. Otherwise, you are like an illiterate high school dropout demanding a chaired position in the English Department at Harvard. It ain't gunna happen.--Filll (talk | wpc) 15:05, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I very much appreciate Filll's warm and welcoming remarks helping to orient me to the Wikipedia community culture.

[Lar]

I very much appreciate Filll's warm and welcoming remarks helping to orient me to the Wikipedia community culture.

His bedside manner may leave something to be desired but this is the same thing a lot of people, including myself, have been telling you for some time.

You don't have to go along with how things are done at WP to have a happy life. There are plenty of other things to do in life that can make you happy.... But typically you do have to edit within the rules (or a reasonable approximation based on your good faith best understanding of them) if you want to edit there. You're not wrong for not wanting to do that, but I don't see you getting unblocked for very long until you internalise what people are telling you. I told you this a while ago.

Like I said, I think I have a collegial and congenial relationship with you. I think you have some valuable insights to share, but until you abide by the rules, you can't edit successfully there, and until you pay your dues, ain't no one gonna listen. You gotta go along to get along.

Does that make me a WP "fixer"? Maybe. But I've effected more change there (and had more fun there, for most definitions of "fun") than you have.

This post has been edited by Lar:

[Kato]

But typically you do have to edit within the rules.

Lar, you talk about "editing within the rules". Ignore all rules. And does anyone think that Filll, Felonius Monk and others were editing within any rules? Of course they weren't. They were edit warring, not assuming good faith, not applying NPOV, not adhering to the basic tenets of BLP, blocking people they were engaging in disputes with etc etc. How on earth is anyone expected to figure out what rules to follow in that environment?

[Lar]

But I've effected more change there (and had more fun there, for most definitions of "fun") than you have.

Lar, you talk about "editing within the rules". Ignore all rules. And does anyone think that Filll, Felonius Monk and others were editing within any rules? Of course they weren't. They were edit warring, not assuming good faith, not applying NPOV, not adhering to the basic tenets of BLP, blocking people they were engaging in disputes with etc etc. How on earth is anyone expected to figure out what rules to follow in that environment?

Ya that behaviour is a problem. But that behaviour is the exception, not the norm. That is not to say that the behaviours you describe are acceptable, they are not. But they are outside the rules. The rules are not that hard to figure out, really. My wife has been reverted, I think, once, and never ever got into an edit war, much less ever been blocked. She has fun, and she does good work. It's possible to edit happily and peacefully.

Do you have to be a happy editor at WP to have a fun life? Heck, no, there are lots of other things to do in the world. But if you want to be a happy editor you have to act like the 5 pillars apply to you, even if others don't in your view, always do so. This is not at all unusual, we have bad people in real life but you don't see people saying "I don't understand the rules of driving" just because someone runs a red light in front of them.

Do with that what you will.

Oh and Jon, given how hard it is to write on Velveeta®, and that it is harder for smaller letters than for larger one, where can I get a slice of Velveeta big enough to inscribe all that stuff???

[Milton Roe]

Ya that behaviour is a problem. But that behaviour is the exception, not the norm. That is not to say that the behaviours you describe are acceptable, they are not. But they are outside the rules. The rules are not that hard to figure out, really.

They aren't? Oh, good, we have somebody here who asserts the rules are easy to figure out, and doesn't just snigger that okay they are nutso, so IAR and write well and pretend you believe in them.

Here are a few starts:

Wikipedia is supposed to strive for "verifiable accuracy". Verifiable turns out to refer to certain types of sources. Accuracy-- well, it's not defined. And with good reason, for in most languages "accuracy" means some sort of correspondance to reality, which is to say, to objective truth. Or at least, to truth as agreed to, by most experts. Especially as regards the sciences, but all domains of intellectual inquiry have their own standards.

From WP:V "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—meaning, in this context, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true."

No help there. We're not interested in just checking that the cite says what WP says it does. That's just the V part. We're interested if the source itself is correct. That's the R or reliable part.

Okay, so you track that down. When you go to find out what WP thinks a "reliable source" is, then you get WP:RS, which insists that sources be those that are "trustworthy" and with "a reputation for fact checking and accuracy." These are direct policy quotes. In other words, they are those we think are likely to be TRUE. Hmmm.

Accuracy is mentioned in WP:VS. What is "accuracy" in this context? Let us take the physical sciences again, where things are easy. Does accuracy not usually mean "correspondance to physical reality," as when we're given a synthetic fact like the mass of a proton, in grams? Does accuracy not mean truth? What does "trustworthy" mean as regards to the source itself, other than likelihood not to report error, lies, or other untruth? And "fact checking," please? What would "fact checking" possibly consist of, if not that somebody has investigated the objective truth of statements? IOW, why would we care if our sources engage in fact checking, if we're not interested in facts???

What is a "fact" if not a statement which is regarded by the majority of experts to be true? "Consistant" is NOT the same as "reliable" and "trustworthy." A source may be consistantly wrong. But how to tell? Here's a gem from WP:RS: "The appropriateness of any source always depends on the context, which is a matter of common sense and editorial judgment." But alas, other names for your own common sense and your own editorial judgment, are POV-pushing and WP:SYNTH. Yes I understand that NPOV doesn't ask for no POV, but it does demand judgments regarding "due weight" which are (as a matter of common sense) impossible to agree on, even for experts, and still less possible for non experts, who, even if they're supposed to be relying on expert opinion, can't be trusted to know who the experts are, much less understand what they're writing.

The world "authoritative" is used. But seems to me meaningless without the idea of truth. If I'm an authority on something, what is it that makes me special? That I know about my subject? Know WHAT about it? Know lies about it? Know erroneous things about it? What is it I know about a subject which makes me an authority? Am I only an authority due to being acknowledged by other authorities? That's sort of recursive, is it not? It might actually operate when it comes to religion, but what about when we go to the real world? When do we get to the part where the airplane flies, the bridge stays up, and the computer network doesn't crash? These are not matters of opinion only. So where do they fit into WP's search for authority, reliablity, and trustworthiness? So far as I can see, nowhere. WP's official policy (frequently ignored, fortunately) is to be written as though an encyclopedia about the world written by people who've been born in the basement of a library, and never been outside its walls. All they have to go on is what they read, and can cite. But that's no way to write about reality. It tends to give you sex manuals written by virgins, and even worse, articles on physics written by people who aren't good with math. Wikipedia has an "expert review needed for this article" tag, but I don't know why, since officially they should never need it.

What is best to cite, even if you're stuck-for-life in a library? Here, we hit WP's official views on "knowledge". Ready for bias? There's a whole paragraph on RS which argues that News Organizations are reliable if they are "high end," and material from them is welcomed. Yes, the world "welcomed" is actually used, as though for respected guests: "Material from mainstream news organizations is welcomed, particularly the high-quality end of the market, such as the The Washington Post, The Times of London, and The Associated Press." Never mind that the opinion of historians and scientists (not to mention most journalists, who don't trust each other an inch) is that newspapers, not excluding "high-quality end of the market" ones are highly unreliable in what they say factually. For one thing, they have no time to get things more than approximately right, and they have heavy bias against fully reporting their own past errors, which they only do enough of, to give readers the (false) impression that they're trying to be somehow exhaustive about this. According to Wikipedia, the idea that newspapers are unreliable, is formally, and as a matter of policy, wrong. Er, which is to say, as a statement, it's not TRUE. Oh, bother.

Anyway, you were explaining how the official rules are easy to figure out. Obviously I've failed to do it, easy or no. So just explain a bit where I missed the idea, since I need help. Assume I'm an educated layman.

Milt

This post has been edited by Milton Roe:

[Lar]

Ya that behaviour is a problem. But that behaviour is the exception, not the norm. That is not to say that the behaviours you describe are acceptable, they are not. But they are outside the rules. The rules are not that hard to figure out, really.

They aren't? Oh, good, we have somebody here who asserts the rules are easy to figure out, and doesn't just snigger that okay they are nutso, so IAR and write well and pretend you believe in them.

Here are a few starts:

Wikipedia is supposed to strive for "verifiable accuracy". Verifiable turns out to refer to certain types of sources. Accuracy-- well, it's not defined. And with good reason, for in most languages "accuracy" means some sort of correspondance to reality, which is to say, to objective truth. Or at least, to truth as agreed to, by most experts. Especially as regards the sciences, but all domains of intellectual inquiry have their own standards.

From WP:V "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—meaning, in this context, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true."

No help there. We're not interested in just checking that the cite says what WP says it does. That's just the V part. We're interested if the source itself is correct. That's the R or reliable part.

Okay, so you track that down. When you go to find out what WP thinks a "reliable source" is, then you get WP:RS, which insists that sources be those that are "trustworthy" and with "a reputation for fact checking and accuracy." These are direct policy quotes. In other words, they are those we think are likely to be TRUE. Hmmm.

Accuracy is mentioned in WP:VS. What is "accuracy" in this context? Let us take the physical sciences again, where things are easy. Does accuracy not usually mean "correspondance to physical reality," as when we're given a synthetic fact like the mass of a proton, in grams? Does accuracy not mean truth? What does "trustworthy" mean as regards to the source itself, other than likelihood not to report error, lies, or other untruth? And "fact checking," please? What would "fact checking" possibly consist of, if not that somebody has investigated the objective truth of statements? IOW, why would we care if our sources engage in fact checking, if we're not interested in facts???

What is a "fact" if not a statement which is regarded by the majority of experts to be true? "Consistant" is NOT the same as "reliable" and "trustworthy." A source may be consistantly wrong. But how to tell? Here's a gem from WP:RS: "The appropriateness of any source always depends on the context, which is a matter of common sense and editorial judgment." But alas, other names for your own common sense and your own editorial judgment, are POV-pushing and WP:SYNTH. Yes I understand that NPOV doesn't ask for no POV, but it does demand judgments regarding "due weight" which are (as a matter of common sense) impossible to agree on, even for experts, and still less possible for non experts, who, even if they're supposed to be relying on expert opinion, can't be trusted to know who the experts are, much less understand what they're writing.

The world "authoritative" is used. But seems to me meaningless without the idea of truth. If I'm an authority on something, what is it that makes me special? That I know about my subject? Know WHAT about it? Know lies about it? Know erroneous things about it? What is it I know about a subject which makes me an authority? Am I only an authority due to being acknowledged by other authorities? That's sort of recursive, is it not? It might actually operate when it comes to religion, but what about when we go to the real world? When do we get to the part where the airplane flies, the bridge stays up, and the computer network doesn't crash? These are not matters of opinion only. So where do they fit into WP's search for authority, reliablity, and trustworthiness? So far as I can see, nowhere. WP's official policy (frequently ignored, fortunately) is to be written as though an encyclopedia about the world written by people who've been born in the basement of a library, and never been outside its walls. All they have to go on is what they read, and can cite. But that's no way to write about reality. It tends to give you sex manuals written by virgins, and even worse, articles on physics written by people who aren't good with math. Wikipedia has an "expert review needed for this article" tag, but I don't know why, since officially they should never need it.

What is best to cite, even if you're stuck-for-life in a library? Here, we hit WP's official views on "knowledge". Ready for bias? There's a whole paragraph on RS which argues that News Organizations are reliable if they are "high end," and material from them is welcomed. Yes, the world "welcomed" is actually used, as though for respected guests: "Material from mainstream news organizations is welcomed, particularly the high-quality end of the market, such as the The Washington Post, The Times of London, and The Associated Press." Never mind that the opinion of historians and scientists (not to mention most journalists, who don't trust each other an inch) is that newspapers, not excluding "high-quality end of the market" ones are highly unreliable in what they say factually. For one thing, they have no time to get things more than approximately right, and they have heavy bias against fully reporting their own past errors, which they only do enough of, to give readers the (false) impression that they're trying to be somehow exhaustive about this. According to Wikipedia, the idea that newspapers are unreliable, is formally, and as a matter of policy, wrong. Er, which is to say, as a statement, it's not TRUE. Oh, bother.

Anyway, you were explaining how the official rules are easy to figure out. Obviously I've failed to do it, easy or no. So just explain a bit where I missed the idea, since I need help. Assume I'm an educated layman.

Milt

First, I don't recall saying the "official" rules are easy to figure out. They aren't. I said the rules are easy to figure out. It's a small distinction but an important one. Just like in real life. I can't remember the exact number of pages here and now, but the US adds thousands of pages of law a day. Which I ignore. I'm a law abiding citizen, not because I spend my entire time analysing all that nonsense about how many feet of yellow lines are required to be painted on curbs or whatever, but because I've figured out the basics... don't steal, don't hurt others, pay my taxes, follow the traffic laws, act with decorum in public. Those are basically all I need for my day to day routine. If I venture into some esoteric area like building permit regulations or whatever, I'll do a little research maybe, but then turn up and ask for reasonableness. It seems to work, aside from that one time as a youth where I threw up in the back of a police car (violating public decorum, I was drunk at the time), because I've never been IN a police car...

So too with Wikipedia. I don't pay close attention to the nuances. There is a thicket of rules, policies, guidelines, essays and more, and you easily can get lost in them if you like. You can even play rules lawyer if you want. But I don't. I just go on about my business. Everything I need to know is in the 5 pillars document.

To your specific example, when I'm writing an article I find the best sources I can and leave it at that. If someone challenges me about them, I discuss it collegially on the talk page and I don't get too sussed if the end result is different than when I started, as long as the reader still will get basically correct information. (to be fair, I write in amazingly uncontentious areas. So does my wife. My choice... but I did run into contention on my FA article... I just fixed up the sources as best I could and dealt with the objections, and it's a better article now than it was)

When I get involved in contentious areas as someone coming in later, I try to do what is reasonable. I don't cite policy that often (BLP being a notable exception, but thats because I'm trying to change things) but I don't need to. I have a reputation as a fairly reasonable person and my words carry weight, the weight I earned by paying my dues.

Now, are there others out there who don't act reasonably, who are not playing the same game I am? Yes.

I don't deny there are problem areas, matters that need fixing, cabals and cliques that need to be put out of business? But that wasn't my point. My point is that the rules are easy to figure out. And they are. That some deviate from the general "reasonableness principle" and ruleslawyer to get their POV pushing way does not mean the rules are not easy to figure out, it means those people need to be addressed.

I believe Moulton could edit happily on WP, and build up a reputation as a reasonable person as well, and gain the influence that came with it, if he wanted. I might be wrong. I don't buy "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" sales pitch. Some people will not, or can not, edit successfully. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by individual makeup, but there it is.

I don't think Moulton is one of those who cannot. He's a reasonable person, if a bit tenacious.

Now, SHOULD Moulton want to do this? I dunno. Not for me to say... It's up to him. There are many many ways to have a wonderful life without ever even reading Wikipedia, much less editing it.

[Moulton]

In order to be a "good Wikipedian," Moulton, you will have to be a better politician and diplomat. I'm not saying I agree with that, but it seems to be the only way for you to get unblocked. That is, if you want to be unblocked. Poor Lar and Dihydrogen Monoxide/Giggy are putting their wiki-reputations on the line for you.

As much as I hate to admit it, you are at the ID Crowd's mercy and will have to accept their terms before there is any chance of you being unblocked.

This is why I don't edit WP much. Too much drama.* The whole system is about favor and nepotism, not merit or knowledge.

*I prefer to be in the audience than a character in the play! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif)

OK, here is a scavenger hunt for you...

Can you find where I asked to be unblocked?

Can you find where I stated, one way or the other, whether or not I desired to be unblocked?

I believe Moulton could edit happily on WP, and build up a reputation as a reasonable person as well, and gain the influence that came with it, if he wanted. I might be wrong. I don't buy "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" sales pitch. Some people will not, or can not, edit successfully. Sometimes by choice, sometimes by individual makeup, but there it is.

OK, more scavenger hunt...

Can you find where I stated under what conditions I would be happy to edit mainspace articles again?

I don't think Moulton is one of those who cannot. He's a reasonable person, if a bit tenacious.

Now, SHOULD Moulton want to do this? I dunno. Not for me to say... It's up to him. There are many many ways to have a wonderful life without ever even reading Wikipedia, much less editing it.

Does anyone have an accurate theory of mind regarding Moulton's beliefs, desires, and intentions with respect to these issues?

If you believe you have such an accurate theory of mind, can you think of a way to find out if it is on the mark?