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Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE

Through Me Is The Way Into The Woeful Wiki

Through Me Is The Way Into The Eternal Woe

Through Me Is The Way Among The Lost People


Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 6:22am) *

I think that in a few years we'll be the nerds on the internet telling people how wikis used to be, while the majority of internet users are off doing some different type of internet hijinks, paying little attention to us because wikis have become irrelevant. At least that is what I hope. smile.gif

You can abandon THAT hope. Wikis (I don't mean Wikipedia Wikis-- I mean all types of collaborative Wikis) are destined to be a core feature of human networked collaboration into the forseeable future for as long as humans (as we know them) work on projects on the internet (as we know it). So don't hold your breath. You might as well wait for websites or bulletin boards or blogs to end.

The good news: most of the bad features of Wikipedia are NOT, repeat NOT, intrinsic features of Wikis themselves.

M


Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 3:42pm) *

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 6:22am) *

I think that in a few years we'll be the nerds on the internet telling people how wikis used to be, while the majority of internet users are off doing some different type of internet hijinks, paying little attention to us because wikis have become irrelevant. At least that is what I hope. smile.gif


You can abandon THAT hope.


http://web.eku.edu/flash/inferno/

Jon Alighieri cool.gif

Posted by: Kelly Martin

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 7:42pm) *

The good news: most of the bad features of Wikipedia are NOT, repeat NOT, intrinsic features of Wikis themselves.
Indeed, they're instead intrinsic features of any large, unmanaged Internet community. Wikipedia exhibits most of the same failings as virtually all other large distance-mediated communities that have come before it. Of course, Wikipedia insists that they're sui generis, and therefore don't have to pay attention to anything that came before. Oops.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 12:35pm) *

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 7:42pm) *

The good news: most of the bad features of Wikipedia are NOT, repeat NOT, intrinsic features of Wikis themselves.


Indeed, they're instead intrinsic features of any large, unmanaged Internet community. Wikipedia exhibits most of the same failings as virtually all other large distance-mediated communities that have come before it. Of course, Wikipedia insists that they're sui generis, and therefore don't have to pay attention to anything that came before. Oops.


No, you are both confusing the Intrinsic Features of a particular genre of SocWare with the probability of their abuse in a given User Population.

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features. In such communities a brand of naive idealism is not wholly unjustified. In the wider world the pleasant fantasy about human behavior purveyed by Wikipediots crosses the line from blissful ignorance to dangerous hallucination.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:00pm) *

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features.


Blah. Only as you can say the same about all writing, personal publishing, and use of computers in general. There's nothing special about Wikis. They're just multi-user message boards and collaborative writing work records, with better record keeping about what is done to them and when. And who does it, if you choose to set them up that way. WP doesn't, but that's not the fault of the mechanism itself. In theory we could (for example) completely cease to pay attention to driver licenses and ID for drivers, and have automobiles with interchangable or missing license plates. The result would be chaos, but not the fault of the automobile itself, as transportation invention, per se. Don't blame Wikis.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:08pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:00pm) *

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features.


Blah. Only as you can say the same about all writing, personal publishing, and use of computers in general. There's nothing special about Wikis. They're just multi-user message boards and collaborative writing work records, with better record keeping about what is done to them and when. And who does it, if you choose to set them up that way. WP doesn't, but that's not the fault of the mechanism itself. In theory we could (for example) completely cease to pay attention to driver licenses and ID for drivers, and have automobiles with interchangable or missing license plates. The result would be chaos, but not the fault of the automobile itself, as transportation invention, per se. Don't blame Wikis.


Er … Do you even know the defining features of the wiki software paradigm?

Why don't you think about this for a while.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: gomi

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 9:35am) *
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 7:42pm) *
The good news: most of the bad features of Wikipedia are NOT, repeat NOT, intrinsic features of Wikis themselves.
Indeed, they're instead intrinsic features of any large, unmanaged Internet community. Wikipedia exhibits most of the same failings as virtually all other large distance-mediated communities that have come before it. Of course, Wikipedia insists that they're sui generis, and therefore don't have to pay attention to anything that came before. Oops.

Welcome, Kelly, but I disagree. In my view, there are several aspects of both Wikipedia and Wikis in general that make them more difficult places to form organized, lasting online communities.

Wikipedia's insistence on continuing the charade of non-hierarchy and consensus decision-making is one key distinguishing characteristic. This silly idea, which sometimes (accidentally) works for very small communities, has utterly failed at WP. In the absence of a designed hierarchy, an ad hoc one has formed, of editing IPs, logged-in editors, and administrators, and then a hierarchy of administrators, with various factions, cabals, the ArbCom, bureaucrats, rollbackers, and whatnot running around. You yourself have eloquently pointed out how the whole "!vote" (not-vote) process that pretends to be consensus hamstrings Wikipedia and could be changed.

Wikis as a class lack the tools to implement a meaningful social structure that would allow for some form of governance, and while one could theoretically overlay that model, I have not seen it happen. In the absence of something deliberate, you get a mob and warlords, as we have now on WP.

Posted by: Rootology

QUOTE(gomi @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 10:17am) *

Wikis as a class lack the tools to implement a meaningful social structure that would allow for some form of governance, and while one could theoretically overlay that model, I have not seen it happen. In the absence of something deliberate, you get a mob and warlords, as we have now on WP.


For public sites that rely on total strangers, sure. Wikis as a software tool are fine for internal uses, though, such as internal corporate knowledge bases, institutional memory dumps, and catalogs of information, where such social structures to "enforce" something aren't needed. But then, in those cases, you have the existing corporate or social structure already in place. A department's manager is still the manager, regardless of "on wiki" or in the cubicle.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

QUOTE(gomi @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:17pm) *

In my view, there are several aspects of both Wikipedia and Wikis in general that make them more difficult places to form organized, lasting online communities.

Wikipedia's insistence on continuing the charade of non-hierarchy and consensus decision-making is one key distinguishing characteristic. This silly idea, which sometimes (accidentally) works for very small communities, has utterly failed at WP. In the absence of a designed hierarchy, an ad hoc one has formed, of editing IPs, logged-in editors, and administrators, and then a hierarchy of administrators, with various factions, cabals, the ArbCom, bureaucrats, rollbackers, and whatnot running around. You yourself have eloquently pointed out how the whole "!vote" (not-vote) process that pretends to be consensus hamstrings Wikipedia and could be changed.

Wikis as a class lack the tools to implement a meaningful social structure that would allow for some form of governance, and while one could theoretically overlay that model, I have not seen it happen. In the absence of something deliberate, you get a mob and warlords, as we have now on WP.
The key failing that allowed Wikipedia to reach the state it's in now was the lack of meaningful governance as it grew. This tends to happen in any human activity which has a relatively low barrier to entry (and really, Wikipedia's barrier to entry is really quite low, you just need to have access to a computer, and those are widely available these days). The naively idealistic refusal by Wikipedia's past leadership (mainly, Jimbo Wales, although there are others responsible as well) to recognize that the community would need structure as it grew in order to avoid rule by warlord led to, well, rule by warlord, or, to borrow a phrase from my former friend, James Forrester (who I hope some day will abandon the Koolaid), a dystopic ochlocracy. Wikipedia has no hierarchy of power; rather, it has competing interest groups (mobs) which clash against one another constantly, forming loose coalitions from time to time but none with any real commitment to anything except their own power group, united by some particular motivation which probably only tangentially has anything to do with Wikipedia's stated goals. There may be hierarchies within these groups, but any global hierarchy is shortlived at best. The oft-stated "hierarchy" of anons, logged-in, administrator, b/crat etc. is such a grotesque simplification of the complex power dynamics that it should not be mentioned except to dismiss it in the same breath.

The fault here is not wikis. It is possible to have useful, managed social structures in a wiki, just as it is possible to have a dystopic ochlocracy in a message board or in USENET. In fact, many of the technical tools needed to help combat the drift toward mob rule already exist and are even available for MediaWiki; there's a huge catalog of extensions for MediaWiki that Wikipedia does not use, many of them developed by other intentional communities to help manage their own community wikis. Wikipedia simply refuses to avail themselves of them. The big one, of course, is to heavily restrict or flatly prohibit editing by anonymous editors.

Wikipedia's experience is by no means unique to wikis, or even to the Internet. Many an intentional community has gone the same way. Wikipedia is simply one of the largest and most visible to do so in recent years. To the degree that Wikipedia's wikiality has accelerated the process, I think that's really just a consequence of being on the Internet, and the concomitant lack of face-to-face interaction that tends to temper some of humanity's worst failings in more traditional intentional communities.

Forming organized, long-lasting communities is hard. Forming them online is even harder. There are some nasty knife-edge balances to be walked and very few groups have navigated them successfully for very long. Wikipedia fell off the teeter-totter a long time ago.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

Wow. Kelly-speak!

Welcome Kelly. Well said, as usual.

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 11:35am) *

Indeed, they're instead intrinsic features of any large, unmanaged Internet community. Wikipedia exhibits most of the same failings as virtually all other large distance-mediated communities that have come before it. Of course, Wikipedia insists that they're sui generis, and therefore don't have to pay attention to anything that came before. Oops.

That's also known as "revinventing the wheel" which always ends up with "reliving all the wheel revision history errors".

I've been on quite a few online communities, and never, ever have I seen such abuse as Wikipedia exhibits. Much of what is acceptable SOP torment on Wikipedia would merit - on any other social networking site, or chat board - a call to the chat board hosting company and a boot for the miscreant.

As for a serious academic production - well, such things just don't happen in those, or rarely so.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

QUOTE(Disillusioned Lackey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 6:21pm) *

I've been on quite a few online communities, and never, ever have I seen such abuse as Wikipedia exhibits. Much of what is acceptable SOP torment on Wikipedia would merit - on any other social networking site, or chat board - a call to the chat board hosting company and a boot for the miscreant.
This happens mainly because Jimmy believes that Wikimedia is immune from suit, and doesn't have any reason to fear bad press (in fact, he seems to relish in it). Most other site operators show enough concern for either legal or PR consequences of grossly abusive behavior as to put a stop to it to protect their bottom line, or simply out of a concern for general human decency (another virtue Wikipedia seems quite lacking in).

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Well, we've all heard the Out Of Control Competing Clique Theory of Wikipediocy (WP:O²C³T), also known as the It's Just Chinatown, er, Chicago, er, DaWeb Theory, so many times before. It is of course the pet theory of such blissfully clueless lights as DT and √ology.

Indeed, though it pains me to confess it, it's a theory that I myself believed, more or less, until the Summer or Fall of 2006.

But, Cheez Wiz, People, I do hope that some of us, at least, have learned a little better than that by now.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Moulton

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:58pm) *
The key failing that allowed Wikipedia to reach the state it's in now was the lack of meaningful governance as it grew. This tends to happen in any human activity which has a relatively low barrier to entry (and really, Wikipedia's barrier to entry is really quite low, you just need to have access to a computer, and those are widely available these days). The naively idealistic refusal by Wikipedia's past leadership (mainly, Jimbo Wales, although there are others responsible as well) to recognize that the community would need structure as it grew in order to avoid rule by warlord led to, well, rule by warlord, or, to borrow a phrase from my former friend, James Forrester (who I hope some day will abandon the Koolaid), a dystopic ochlocracy.

Thank you for introducing that term into my vocabulary, Kelly.

QUOTE(Kelly Martin)
Wikipedia has no hierarchy of power; rather, it has competing interest groups (mobs) which clash against one another constantly, forming loose coalitions from time to time but none with any real commitment to anything except their own power group, united by some particular motivation which probably only tangentially has anything to do with Wikipedia's stated goals. There may be hierarchies within these groups, but any global hierarchy is shortlived at best. The oft-stated "hierarchy" of anons, logged-in, administrator, b/crat etc. is such a grotesque simplification of the complex power dynamics that it should not be mentioned except to dismiss it in the same breath.

So it's not just an ochlocracy, it's an ad hoc ochlocracy.

QUOTE(Kelly Martin)
The fault here is not wikis. It is possible to have useful, managed social structures in a wiki, just as it is possible to have a dystopic ochlocracy in a message board or in USENET. In fact, many of the technical tools needed to help combat the drift toward mob rule already exist and are even available for MediaWiki; there's a huge catalog of extensions for MediaWiki that Wikipedia does not use, many of them developed by other intentional communities to help manage their own community wikis. Wikipedia simply refuses to avail themselves of them. The big one, of course, is to heavily restrict or flatly prohibit editing by anonymous editors.

Intentional communities are built on trust. When those in ad hoc ochlocrical power are anonymous cowards to boot, you've got something that is truly unspeakable.

QUOTE(Kelly Martin)
Forming organized, long-lasting communities is hard. Forming them online is even harder. There are some nasty knife-edge balances to be walked and very few groups have navigated them successfully for very long. Wikipedia fell off the teeter-totter a long time ago.

There are some useful http://underground.musenet.org:8080/orenda/community.html building that we discovered back in the 90s with some of the first online intentional learning communities that took the next step beyond IRC and UseNet NewsGroups.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:58pm) *

QUOTE(gomi @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:17pm) *

In my view, there are several aspects of both Wikipedia and Wikis in general that make them more difficult places to form organized, lasting online communities.

Wikipedia's insistence on continuing the charade of non-hierarchy and consensus decision-making is one key distinguishing characteristic. This silly idea, which sometimes (accidentally) works for very small communities, has utterly failed at WP. In the absence of a designed hierarchy, an ad hoc one has formed, of editing IPs, logged-in editors, and administrators, and then a hierarchy of administrators, with various factions, cabals, the ArbCom, bureaucrats, rollbackers, and whatnot running around. You yourself have eloquently pointed out how the whole "!vote" (not-vote) process that pretends to be consensus hamstrings Wikipedia and could be changed.

Wikis as a class lack the tools to implement a meaningful social structure that would allow for some form of governance, and while one could theoretically overlay that model, I have not seen it happen. In the absence of something deliberate, you get a mob and warlords, as we have now on WP.


The key failing that allowed Wikipedia to reach the state it's in now was the lack of meaningful governance as it grew. This tends to happen in any human activity which has a relatively low barrier to entry (and really, Wikipedia's barrier to entry is really quite low, you just need to have access to a computer, and those are widely available these days). The naively idealistic refusal by Wikipedia's past leadership (mainly, Jimbo Wales, although there are others responsible as well) to recognize that the community would need structure as it grew in order to avoid rule by warlord led to, well, rule by warlord, or, to borrow a phrase from my former friend, James Forrester (who I hope some day will abandon the Koolaid), a dystopic ochlocracy. Wikipedia has no hierarchy of power; rather, it has competing interest groups (mobs) which clash against one another constantly, forming loose coalitions from time to time but none with any real commitment to anything except their own power group, united by some particular motivation which probably only tangentially has anything to do with Wikipedia's stated goals. There may be hierarchies within these groups, but any global hierarchy is shortlived at best. The oft-stated "hierarchy" of anons, logged-in, administrator, b/crat etc. is such a grotesque simplification of the complex power dynamics that it should not be mentioned except to dismiss it in the same breath.

The fault here is not wikis. It is possible to have useful, managed social structures in a wiki, just as it is possible to have a dystopic ochlocracy in a message board or in USENET. In fact, many of the technical tools needed to help combat the drift toward mob rule already exist and are even available for MediaWiki; there's a huge catalog of extensions for MediaWiki that Wikipedia does not use, many of them developed by other intentional communities to help manage their own community wikis. Wikipedia simply refuses to avail themselves of them. The big one, of course, is to heavily restrict or flatly prohibit editing by anonymous editors.

Wikipedia's experience is by no means unique to wikis, or even to the Internet. Many an intentional community has gone the same way. Wikipedia is simply one of the largest and most visible to do so in recent years. To the degree that Wikipedia's wikiality has accelerated the process, I think that's really just a consequence of being on the Internet, and the concomitant lack of face-to-face interaction that tends to temper some of humanity's worst failings in more traditional intentional communities.

Forming organized, long-lasting communities is hard. Forming them online is even harder. There are some nasty knife-edge balances to be walked and very few groups have navigated them successfully for very long. Wikipedia fell off the teeter-totter a long time ago.


Cf. http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,14.0.html.

The "key failing" of Wikipedia — as an e-spousedly knowledge-oriented project — is that it's so overrun by people whose Need For Hugs exceeds their Need To Know.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:14pm) *

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:08pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:00pm) *

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features.


Blah. Only as you can say the same about all writing, personal publishing, and use of computers in general. There's nothing special about Wikis. They're just multi-user message boards and collaborative writing work records, with better record keeping about what is done to them and when. And who does it, if you choose to set them up that way. WP doesn't, but that's not the fault of the mechanism itself. In theory we could (for example) completely cease to pay attention to driver licenses and ID for drivers, and have automobiles with interchangable or missing license plates. The result would be chaos, but not the fault of the automobile itself, as transportation invention, per se. Don't blame Wikis.


Er … Do you even know the defining features of the wiki software paradigm?

Why don't you think about this for a while.

Jon cool.gif


In fact I do. And also know that these features form a kernal which can be modified with as many layers of responsiblity, security, and editorial review as you like, and still be a collection of wiki pages (or, if you like, a wiki). Wikis are speeded up methods for collaborative writing on a computer using internet connection between users, is all. They don't do anything a collections of typewriters, secretaries, photocopiers, and the US postal service couldn't do. Ala(n) Turing, all they are, is faster.

If you're going to argue that there are special pathologies to be watched for in any collaborative activity of human beings, even fully documented and identified and watched human beings, fine. But again, don't blame wikis for it. If such there are, wikis have nothing to do with it. These things would exist without wikis. With faster cooperation would you get more rapid pathologies associated with cooperative thinking? Sure. And all the positive things, too. If you believe cooperative activity itself contains more positives than negatives, you'll approve of any system which speeds it up. And if not, I think you're arguing against civilization. On the internet, LOL.

Now, if you still think you have a point, I want to to tell me EXACTLY what feature you think DEFINES the wiki paradigm, in a sine qua non fashion, and which specially contributes some kind of social problem to it.

M.

Posted by: the fieryangel

QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 8:33pm) *

There are some useful http://underground.musenet.org:8080/orenda/community.html building that we discovered back in the 90s with some of the first online intentional learning communities that took the next step beyond IRC and UseNet NewsGroups.


Yes, Moulton, your history with musenet obviously gives you "expert status" in terms of discussing the phenomenon of this type of community dynamic....and I myself can't help wondering if it wasn't one of the contributing factors to the decision to "run you out of town on a rail"....

If I were running a service like WP, and found that I had a volunteer with this type of experience, I myself would have tried to get this type of person involved resolving issues that had come up with the Musenet project, especially those concerning children. But, since WP denies that anything out of the past has value, perhaps this type of credential simply had to be expelled from the system in order to allow the koolaid drinkers to continue to have all of that delicious fresh taste?

Posted by: Moulton

http://www.advs.net/, known as http://underground.musenet.org:8080/~macduff/teacherdoc.html, has been with the project since September 1993; she joined MicroMuse when the project was 3 1/2 years old.

In real life she hast taught arbitration, mediation, and conflict resolution since 1991 at the http://weatherhead.cwru.edu/ at Case Western Reserve University, and makes her living as a practicing arbitrator, primarily in labor disputes.

Shortly after joining MicroMuse, MacDuff assumed the role of Mediator, chairing the committee that handled both interpersonal conflicts and disciplinary cases involving breaches of the MicroMuse Social Contract.

In other words, MacDuff is to MicroMuse as ArbCom is to Wikipedia.

Her primary professional research interest is conflict in organizations. This has stimulated investigations into such real-world topics as industrial democracy, labor law reform proposals, deunionization, and fair share fee law and practices. Since joining MicroMuse in 1993, she has also been studying conflict in virtual communities.

In 1997, Anna Duval Smith published http://www.advs.net/cinc.htm which subsequently appeared as http://books.google.com/books?id=harO_jeoyUwC&pg=PP1&ots=JWOK6O6ruR&sig=1oM1iTivWCgwYV2vI7y551pyi-4&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA134,M1 in http://books.google.com/books?id=harO_jeoyUwC&pg=PP1&ots=JWOK6O6ruR&sig=1oM1iTivWCgwYV2vI7y551pyi-4&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result, edited by Peter Kollock and Marc Smith, and published by Routledge Press in 1998.

Here is the Abstract of that paper:

QUOTE(Abstract)


http://www.advs.net/cinc.htm

Abstract


This paper explores the sources of conflict and techniques of social control in an open-access, text-based virtual community. It argues that such social systems have the same kinds of opportunities and problems brought by diversity that real communities do, but that unique features of cyberspace make effective conflict management both more important and more difficult. Cases of interpersonal disputes collected during more than two years of participant observation revealed that power strategies of social control were generally counterproductive in managing the conflict that resulted from the multiplicity of values, goals, interests and cultural norms brought by members of the community. As in real life, methods that reconcile divergent interests (mediation and factfinding) and adjudicate rights (factfinding and arbitration) appeared to manage issue-based conflicts more effectively. However, their utility and, therefore, the community's ability to adapt and thrive as an open, goal-directed system depends on member awareness of the program, human resource availability and administration willingness to share power.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:49pm) *

Most other site operators show enough concern for either legal or PR consequences of grossly abusive behavior as to put a stop to it to protect their bottom line, or simply out of a concern for general human decency (another virtue Wikipedia seems quite lacking in).

Most are on the human decency side. Ive seen a major corporation-owned chat board come down hard on someone who outed names (my but compared to Wikipedia that seems like such a small thing, but to us, it was a huge event).

On the other hand, I was a near victim in an Ebay fraud in 2001 or 2002, and was helping to organize the victims to report to (yes, the irony) the FBI, and I had friends who were early hires at the company, so I had them get me the Chairman's office assistants contact details... the response (at least from the assistant was...) "this is not our problem". He was really young. I tried to explain about press, falling stock prices, but um, um.... Then within the next year, I saw on MSNBC, that they got nailed by another case, and suddenly they were all about the anti-fraud. smile.gif

Jimbo plays a different game of parchesi. cool.gif You put it right. He revels in the slippery side, and frankly relishes that other people feel discomfort. If not are downright hurt. huh.gif

QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 25th June 2008, 5:43am) *

Abstract


This paper explores the sources of conflict and techniques of social control in an open-access, text-based virtual community. ...

Then there's this

IPB Image

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 25th June 2008, 4:26am) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:14pm) *

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:08pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:00pm) *

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features.


Blah. Only as you can say the same about all writing, personal publishing, and use of computers in general. There's nothing special about Wikis. They're just multi-user message boards and collaborative writing work records, with better record keeping about what is done to them and when. And who does it, if you choose to set them up that way. WP doesn't, but that's not the fault of the mechanism itself. In theory we could (for example) completely cease to pay attention to driver licenses and ID for drivers, and have automobiles with interchangable or missing license plates. The result would be chaos, but not the fault of the automobile itself, as transportation invention, per se. Don't blame Wikis.


Er … Do you even know the defining features of the wiki software paradigm?

Why don't you think about this for a while.

Jon cool.gif


In fact I do. And also know that these features form a kernal which can be modified with as many layers of responsiblity, security, and editorial review as you like, and still be a collection of wiki pages (or, if you like, a wiki). Wikis are speeded up methods for collaborative writing on a computer using internet connection between users, is all. They don't do anything a collections of typewriters, secretaries, photocopiers, and the US postal service couldn't do. Ala(n) Turing, all they are, is faster.

If you're going to argue that there are special pathologies to be watched for in any collaborative activity of human beings, even fully documented and identified and watched human beings, fine. But again, don't blame wikis for it. If such there are, wikis have nothing to do with it. These things would exist without wikis. With faster cooperation would you get more rapid pathologies associated with cooperative thinking? Sure. And all the positive things, too. If you believe cooperative activity itself contains more positives than negatives, you'll approve of any system which speeds it up. And if not, I think you're arguing against civilization. On the internet, LOL.

Now, if you still think you have a point, I want to to tell me EXACTLY what feature you think DEFINES the wiki paradigm, in a sine qua non fashion, and which specially contributes some kind of social problem to it.

M.


Let's say you publish an article in a scholarly journal and some other scholar disagrees with your conclusions. What does he do? He writes another article criticizing your arguments and methods and so on and tries to argue for his own point of view.

That is the normal way of doing things. It's incremental and monotone — at least, so far as the historical record goes.

Wikis are very different from that. The present state of the Virtual Record is evanescent to the max. In the wiki paradigm as initially conceived the indelible recording of every edit was intended to compensate for that transience of the Evanescent Present, but Wikipedia's increasing use of history-erasing and history-rewriting has removed even that littlest bit of a safety net.

Employed by a pre-existing community that observes a pre-existing discipline, the delibility of the current draft on the magic slate can be a useful feature. But delibility of the historical record is a debilitating bug no matter how carefully one tries to control it.

Employed by Wikipediots, the distinctive features of the wiki paradigm are nothing but a quicker road to wikiperdition.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:58pm) *

The fault here is not wikis. It is possible to have useful, managed social structures in a wiki, just as it is possible to have a dystopic ochlocracy in a message board or in USENET. In fact, many of the technical tools needed to help combat the drift toward mob rule already exist and are even available for MediaWiki; there's a huge catalog of extensions for MediaWiki that Wikipedia does not use, many of them developed by other intentional communities to help manage their own community wikis. Wikipedia simply refuses to avail themselves of them. The big one, of course, is to heavily restrict or flatly prohibit editing by anonymous editors.

QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 8:33pm) *

Intentional communities are built on trust. When those in ad hoc ochlocrical power are anonymous cowards to boot, you've got something that is truly unspeakable.


All intentional communities are of course built on trust, since their goal is cooperation, and parasitism, vandalism, and various kinds of dysfunctional communications destroy that. But high levels of trust must be earned, and this takes experience and time.

Kelly makes the point, which could use further emphasis, that a real shift in type and governance of community happens at the expansion point where you're working with members you don't know personally quite well (have a long personal history with). That happens as villages grow into towns and then big cities. Indirectly, it's responsible for a lot of town and especially big city pathology. If you don't expect to see a person ever again (your place is so large that you interact mostly with strangers all the time) then a lot of normal human community-building brain activity just has no input. The result is very bad.

Historically, the rise of the modern large city goes along with the invention of writing. This may not be coincidence, since there are some data-and-record keeping functions of groups of humans larger than a small neolithic village, and with rapid turnover, that simply can't be stored without memory aid. Think Code of Hammurabi. In little villages everybody knows the rules, which may not even be written down.

As I've said before, I think the large human brain is mainly designed by evolution for one task: social information processing (Soc-IT). This includes all the substuff that has to do with reproduction, and at outside the family level, it has to do with evaluating other people's intensions, reputations, places in power structures, and how they can be possible enemies or allies. Who's the "witch" or "screwup" today? Who's more dangerous than they look? Who can stab me in the back if they like, and get away with it? The brain wasn't grown to 1350 cm^3 to solve math problems! Darwin was shocked to find communities of humans in Terra del Fuego who were nearly naked and had no writing and almost no technology. But they DID have a complicated language and culture, as do all human socities. That's a clue.

That's what the brain does. If humans don't use their huge brains to do several hours of social information processing a day, they invent artifical ways to get artificial input (soap opera, reality TV, and the like). But this, like a drug, does no actual community soc-IT work! Outside of your day-job (assuming you're not getting your Soc-IT vitamins with office politics), in a rich Western society, you probably spend many more hours doing Soc-IT processing on artificial crap (your TV, novels, other news, and net 1.0) than you do with real volunteer and social organizations, or in fulfilling civic duties like jury duty or voting or voter registration or highway trash collection, or commons cleanup or whatever. This also has become a disaster in the last 60 years, basiclly since TV began to clog our inputs and anesthetize us about loss of small village-type communities.

You can look at the loss of card-playing and bowling leages and community chests and so on, and it all begins to disappear around 1950, pretty much like our polar ice caps. It's due to SOME kind of technology. You don't like TV as cause? Okay, fine. I leave it to you to figure out.

Web 2.0 has the chance of bringing back some virtual community, so long as it unplugs the artificial one-way nature of Web 1.0 and TV. Thus, it's no use spending years earning a "rep" in some Second-Life or Wikipedia persona, if it's not a real one connected to your real identity. Most of the Soc-IT processor time you burned with other people's networked brains, is as wasted in an anonymous on-line community, as when viewers decide who to vote off American Idol. No help here!

With Web 2.0 we have some chance again to bring some of it back. But without connection to identifiable brains, it's just another MMPORPG, as has been pointed out.

Does going back to the way humans are evolved to live (i.e., you know a few hundred people reasonably well, for some years, and work with them on projects) guarantee that you'll have no social problems? NO! Even the Amish still resort to shunning occassionally, and it's very much like WP community banning. But it's rare by contrast with what happens on WP.

Are there consequences to not allowing humans to form communities of the type we've evolved with? Yes, dire ones! sad.gif Look at big city pathology. And look at the number of people whose only community is at their place-of-work. What happens when they retire? Do you know, for example, how many retired cops "eat their pistols"? Enough that every group of cops knows exactly what syndrome you're talking about in this matter, and has a name for it. People just aren't meant to take this level of dislocation and thive, or even survive.

M.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

The mystique of relying on a priori biological analogies and half-baked political metaphors for what should be a publishing enterprise is the lion's share of what got the Sanger-Wales models of encyclopedias into the sewer they inhabit today.

I think it is well past time that we drop the Social Darwinism and Cultural Larmarkianism and start thinking about some hypotheses that might actually explain the phenomena that are staring us in the face.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 25th June 2008, 2:16pm) *


Let's say you publish an article in a scholarly journal and some other scholar disagrees with your conclusions. What does he do? He writes another article criticizing your arguments and methods and so on and tries to argue for his own point of view.

That is the normal way of doing things. It's incremental and monotone — at least, so far as the historical record goes.

Wikis are very different from that. The present state of the Virtual Record is evanescent to the max. In the wiki paradigm as initially conceived the indelible recording of every edit was intended to compensate for that transience of the Evanescent Present, but Wikipedia's increasing use of history-erasing and history-rewriting has removed even that littlest bit of a safety net.

Employed by a pre-existing community that observes a pre-existing discipline, the delibility of the current draft on the magic slate can be a useful feature. But delibility of the historical record is a debilitating bug no matter how carefully one tries to control it.



Best post of the year so far.

Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 25th June 2008, 8:56pm) *

The use of a priori biological analogies and half-baked political metaphors for what should be a publishing enterprise is the lion's share of what got the Sanger-Wales models of encyclopedias into the sewer they inhabit today.

I think it is well past time that we drop the Social Darwinism and Cultural Larmarkianism and start thinking about some hypotheses that might actually explain the phenomena that are staring us in the face.

Jon cool.gif

Any "publishing enterprise" (like any large enterprise to do ANYTHING) will have a community of people, and that community will have a culture which is in part DEFINED by the task they're trying to do. I don't care if the community mission is to land on the moon, develop an atom bomb, or fly missions off an aircraft carrier into Iraq. Or write a Great Encyclopedia of 10 million pages. For an encylopedia, the culture may be at a publishing house or university or both. Or be extended as much as you like. It will have a dynamic. And if it has existed for long, it will have plenty of people who don't talk to each other, and its own cultural dynamic which an outsider will be able to immediately read. Because it's not immediately transparent, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Good luck trying to do any social anthropology without a working hypothesis (and method of generation of same) of cultural institutions and how they arise and mature. I personally happen to like Social Darwinism and Cultural Larmarkianism as you call them (evolutionary psychology is the modern name), and think they are neatly explanatory of all kinds of things. And predictive, too. You don't. Okay, so what?

What do you suggest instead, as a starting point? Dialectical materialism and class struggle? Freudian psychoanalysis? Levi-Strauss structuralism? Jungian or somebody else's archetype analysis? What?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 25th June 2008, 5:13pm) *

Any "publishing enterprise" (like any large enterprise to do ANYTHING) will have a community of people, and that community will have a culture which is in part DEFINED by the task they're trying to do. I don't care if it's go to the moon, develop at atom bomb, or fly missions off an aircraft carrier into Iraq. For an encylopedia, the culture may be at a publishing house or university or both. It will have a dynamic. And if it has existed for long, it will have plenty of people who don't talk to each other, and its own cultural dynamic which an outsider will be able to immediately read. Because it's not immediately transparent, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Good luck trying to do any social anthropology without a working hypothesis (and method of generation of same) of cultural institutions and how they arise and mature. I personally happen to like Social Darwinism and Cultural Larmarkianism as you call them (evolutionary psychology is the modern name), and think they are neatly explanatory of all kinds of things. And predictive, too. You don't. Okay, so what?

What do you suggest instead, as a starting point? Dialectical materialism and class struggle? Freudian psychoanalysis? Levi-Strauss structuralism? Jungian or somebody else's archetype analysis? What?


You are making the category error of confusing a statistical population with a state-istical community.

So watch out for that …

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 25th June 2008, 9:02pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 25th June 2008, 2:16pm) *


Let's say you publish an article in a scholarly journal and some other scholar disagrees with your conclusions. What does he do? He writes another article criticizing your arguments and methods and so on and tries to argue for his own point of view.

That is the normal way of doing things. It's incremental and monotone — at least, so far as the historical record goes.

Wikis are very different from that. The present state of the Virtual Record is evanescent to the max. In the wiki paradigm as initially conceived the indelible recording of every edit was intended to compensate for that transience of the Evanescent Present, but Wikipedia's increasing use of history-erasing and history-rewriting has removed even that littlest bit of a safety net.

Employed by a pre-existing community that observes a pre-existing discipline, the delibility of the current draft on the magic slate can be a useful feature. But delibility of the historical record is a debilitating bug no matter how carefully one tries to control it.



Best post of the year so far.



He has a point, but evanescense is completely subjective if copies are made of everything, and trusted. The "indelible history of changes" part really is a sine qua non of a Wiki-network, as originally defined by Cunningham the inventor, or indeed any database, since the word "data" hardly implies, or can be used as a name for, a tissue of lies (or Russia's famous "unstable history.")

IOW, what John Awbrey's complaining about is special to WP, and (so far as I can tell) probably qualifies them to be called something else OTHER than a Wiki-database, if they carry it very far. No identifiable data, no database.

Thus if they oversight their history to any extent which isn't necesary for privacy, they won't be a Wiki database. And we are free to rename them to Shitipedia or anything we like that doesn't contain the word "wiki."

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 25th June 2008, 9:18pm) *

You are making the category error of confusing a statistical population with a state-istical community.

So watch out for that …

Jon cool.gif

Define your terms. You think WP is more like a "state"? You think some sort of political analysis is more appropriate?

I personally think Wikipedia is more like Beirut of 1985. You can talk about its politics, but not in terms of functional modern states.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Milton has just recited the sort of recitation that I was constantly fond of reciting a couple of years ago by way explaining how Wikipedia was not generic among wiki species but a degenerate perversion of the type.

So let us stipulate to that.

Being so much smarted and consequently so much smarter than I was a couple of years ago, I now have to insist that the cloven hoof was always present in the wiki paradigm itself, and that it was only the very special care and feeding of special interest groups that prevented it from becoming viral from the start.

But now it has …

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 25th June 2008, 5:29pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Wed 25th June 2008, 9:18pm) *

You are making the category error of confusing a statistical population with a state-istical community.

So watch out for that …

Jon cool.gif


Define your terms. You think WP is more like a "state"? You think some sort of political analysis is more appropriate?

I personally think Wikipedia is more like Beirut of 1985. You can talk about its politics, but not in terms of functional modern states.


No, the opposite.

The most that I can say with any degree of confidence about Wikipedia is that there is a Population of people who are interacting with each other to some degree by way of some technical device.

If you want to go beyond the maximally weak hypothesis of a Population and invoke a word with the ostensibly stronger but vaguely stronger connotations of a Community, then you have to define your term.

So far you have only hinted at your meaning by way of analogy to a rather large variety of models, none of which, on closer examination, actually fit Wikipedia very well.

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:08pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:00pm) *

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features.


Blah. Only as you can say the same about all writing, personal publishing, and use of computers in general. There's nothing special about Wikis. They're just multi-user message boards and collaborative writing work records, with better record keeping about what is done to them and when. And who does it, if you choose to set them up that way. WP doesn't, but that's not the fault of the mechanism itself. In theory we could (for example) completely cease to pay attention to driver licenses and ID for drivers, and have automobiles with interchangable or missing license plates. The result would be chaos, but not the fault of the automobile itself, as transportation invention, per se. Don't blame Wikis.


Now where have I heard this argument before?

Oh, yeah, I read it on a bumper sticker —

QUOTE

• • • Guns Don't Kill People • • •
Only Bat-Shit Insane Supreme Court Justices
Make It As Easy As They Possibly Can For
People To Keep On Killing People


Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Milton Roe

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Fri 27th June 2008, 3:45am) *

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 1:08pm) *

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Mon 23rd June 2008, 5:00pm) *

The Intrinsic Features that permit the abuses in question are integral to the wiki paradigm — it is only that well-disciplined communities of interest seldom abuse the powers afforded by these features.


Blah. Only as you can say the same about all writing, personal publishing, and use of computers in general. There's nothing special about Wikis. They're just multi-user message boards and collaborative writing work records, with better record keeping about what is done to them and when. And who does it, if you choose to set them up that way. WP doesn't, but that's not the fault of the mechanism itself. In theory we could (for example) completely cease to pay attention to driver licenses and ID for drivers, and have automobiles with interchangable or missing license plates. The result would be chaos, but not the fault of the automobile itself, as transportation invention, per se. Don't blame Wikis.


Now where have I heard this argument before?

Oh, yeah, I read it on a bumper sticker —

QUOTE

• • • Guns Don't Kill People • • •
Only Bat-Shit Insane Supreme Court Justices
Make It As Easy As They Possibly Can For
People To Keep On Killing People


Jon cool.gif

I think that bumper sticker is batshit insane. I grew up in one of those sleepy states that start with a vowel, which "bicoastal" people fly over and try not to think about, on their way to their homes in their gated communities, wherefrom they lobby the world with their liberal wisdom.

I grew up with guns. I have an arsenal of them, and so did my father before me and his before him. And so did all my friends. We shot them for fun, we hunted with them (something I've actually long since found un-fun, I think after learning to apprecitate life), we used them for target practice (still fun-- but now at a range). Nobody ever pointed them an anybody else, even in play, because we'd had the shit trained out of us on gun safety, and even pointing an empty one at somebody felt about as unnaturally horrid as French-kissing granny with her teeth out. Consequently I never heard of anybody ever getting shot for any reason in my town or school or even my whole state. It may have happened once, but I must have missed it. Nobody I ever saw took their weapons to school, even though all of us owned at least one. It never even occurred to us.

Do people kill people? You bet. We didn't.

Does my state have more violence now? Not enough to keep us from nearly universal concealed carry of pistols for those with no criminal records. Is there gun violence in my state? Yes, but the people who carry them legally don't do it. Nor do people born there do it. A lot of people from L.A. have since moved into my old home state. Instead of getting away from their old problems, they brought them with them. But their problems weren't weapons, it was what was in their minds. That, we cannot outlaw.

M. (From a rural past, and screw you if you think ill of it).

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

The Barbecue Has Been Cancelled —

Too Many Joints In The Inferno Already —

But The Durova Brag Contest Is Still On —

Jon cool.gif

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 3:03pm) *

QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 3:42pm) *

QUOTE(BobbyBombastic @ Sun 22nd June 2008, 6:22am) *

I think that in a few years we'll be the nerds on the internet telling people how wikis used to be, while the majority of internet users are off doing some different type of internet hijinks, paying little attention to us because wikis have become irrelevant. At least that is what I hope. smile.gif


You can abandon THAT hope.


http://web.eku.edu/flash/inferno/

Jon Alighieri Image


It looks like the old Flash Inferno is gone, but this may be a current version of it —

http://people.eku.edu/kingt/inferno/

Jon ph34r.gif

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I tracked down the credit for that Animated Inferno —

http://go2king.com/

Jon Image