Critique Of Pure Hypocrisy : The Daily Howl, Paradigm, Policy, Protocol : The Pseuds Thereof Options

I think we need something like a «Paradigm, Policy, Protocol» board devoted the critique of, what else, paradigms, policies, and protocols in the world of wiki media sites, whether it be a genuine, an ostensible, or a pseudo-exemplar of its species.

By way of looking past the Frabjous Day when the Jimbowik is certifiably dead, I have formulated the board proposal in generic terms, but of course in the mean time, the very mean time indeed, it will probably be occupied with examples from Wikipedia.

As it stands, I can never figure out whether to needle a thread about a specific policy on the General Discursion or the Burrocrap board. Either way, there's the usual tendency for the discussion to degenerate into focusing on the character flaws of the individual Admins involved rather than the self-contradictions built into the policy base itself.

Anyway, here's the Daily Hypocrisy that brought this all flooding back to mind —

WP:Administrafers' Not Nice Board/Indecents#Severe Volition Of WP:CANDIASS

Those of you who have been the victims of Bak.Room and IRC.∑ Admin canvassing will know what a Cruel Addition Of Insult To Injury this latest hypocrisy really is.

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

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

Some policies, practices, and protocols are well designed and carefully crafted to prevent, neutralize, ameliorate, or remediate the harmful effects of a haphazard misadventure.

In the worst case, some policies, practices, and protocols are iatrogenic, meaning they exacerbate the ailment and spread it to others.

Consider the disease now known as Tuberculosis. It has other names including Consumption, Wasting Disease, White Plague, Phthisis, Scrofula, King's Evil, Miliary TB, Tabes Mesenterica, Lupus Vulgaris and Prosector's Wart.

Wikipedia seems to be consuming itself with its own idiosyncratic paradigm of Chronic Wasting Disease which we might also call Prosecutor's Wart. The dysfunctional paradigm on Wikipedia is the antithesis of a self-correcting, self-healing paradigm. The dysfunctional paradigm on Wikipedia is a transparent example of an iatrogenic process that consumptively disects, castigates, indicts, prosecutes, excoriates, convicts, sanctions, ostracizes, stigmatizes, and demonizes participants in an orgiastic crescendo descendo of internal self-destruction.

I model the pathological paradigm of Wikipolitics in term of the Gravitas Model...

Gravitas

Ex-Communication Technology
↓
Community Unraveling
↓
Alienation and Disgust

Pedantic Scholiasm. The way I remember the word iatrogenic — Geek for «caused by iatollahs» — being used in psychiatry, it simply meant "caused by the healer", and so you have to say "iatrogenic disease" if you mean a bad thing caused by the healer (more generally, a teacher or a practitioner of any kind).

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

Some policies, practices, and protocols are well designed and carefully crafted to prevent, neutralize, ameliorate, or remediate the harmful effects of a haphazard misadventure.

In the worst case, some policies, practices, and protocols are iatrogenic, meaning they exacerbate the ailment and spread it to others.

Consider the disease now known as Tuberculosis. It has other names including Consumption, Wasting Disease, White Plague, Phthisis, Scrofula, King's Evil, Miliary TB, Tabes Mesenterica, Lupus Vulgaris and Prosector's Wart.

Wikipedia seems to be consuming itself with its own idiosyncratic paradigm of Chronic Wasting Disease which we might also call Prosecutor's Wart. The dysfunctional paradigm on Wikipedia is the antithesis of a self-correcting, self-healing paradigm. The dysfunctional paradigm on Wikipedia is a transparent example of an iatrogenic process that consumptively disects, castigates, indicts, prosecutes, excoriates, convicts, sanctions, ostracizes, stigmatizes, and demonizes participants in an orgiastic crescendo descendo of internal self-destruction.

I model the pathological paradigm of Wikipolitics in term of the Gravitas Model...

Gravitas

Ex-Communication Technology
↓
Community Unraveling
↓
Alienation and Disgust

I will have to go x-cavating for a mime of my first brouillon projet toward an Electronic Community Of Inquiry (ECOI), but here is the Usual Wikipediot Form Of Critique (UWFOC) of my last projet, dubbed «Joy Of Learning, Inquiry, Exploration (JOLIE)».

No doubt those WP:KILLJOYS thought I was e-personating a celebrity.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

20:41, 6 September 2006 KillerChihuahua (Talk | contribs) deleted "Wikipedia:WikiProject Joy Of Learning, Inquiry, Exploration" ‎ (Nonsense, disruption. User has started at least five projects in the last week.)

KillerChihuaha is quite the character, eh?

I have the distinct impression she finds the learning process more painful than pleasurable.

Pity.

By way of background for the discussion of Ruliness and Unruliness, it may help to peruse the Main Page and Talk Page for one of the last Wikipedia Projects that I worked on, charged with writing up a Simplified Ruleset —

WikiPedia:Simplified Ruleset

WikiTedia:Simplified Ruleset

Shortly after joining the project, I suggested changing the name to Precepts or maybe WikiPrecepts, drawing on language going back to Hippocrates that is still common in medical schools, where adjunct faculty who supervise practical internships in the community are often called Preceptors.

Much Hilarity Ensued …

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

Looks like the Preceptors were overtaken by the Interceptors.

Rather off-topic: I can't believe that Kim Bruning was insisting that Jonny copy and paste. I figured out not too long ago that doing that goes against the GFDL license by disconnecting the contributions from the contributors. To think that maniac Kim ran for the Board at one point and he didn't know the legal and ethical implications of copying and pasting? Sorry for the off-topicness. As you were gentleman and ladies.

Pedantic Scholiasm. The way I remember the word iatrogenic — Geek for «caused by iatollahs» — being used in psychiatry, it simply meant "caused by the healer", and so you have to say "iatrogenic disease" if you mean a bad thing caused by the healer (more generally, a teacher or a practitioner of any kind).

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

This seems to suggest Illich's writings from the 60s and 70s. I have been thinking about what Tools for Conviviality might have to say about wikis in general and WP specifically. Does this ever come up in your Inquiry discussions?

Rather off-topic: I can't believe that Kim Bruning was insisting that Jonny copy and paste. I figured out not too long ago that doing that goes against the GFDL license by disconnecting the contributions from the contributors. To think that maniac Kim ran for the Board at one point and he didn't know the legal and ethical implications of copying and pasting? Sorry for the off-topicness. As you were gentleman and ladies.

Jeez. Perhaps Burning can't conceive of someone forming their own thoughts.

Looks like the Preceptors were overtaken by the Interceptors.

More like «Raptors Of The Dip» —
Probably caused by coming↑for err too fast.

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

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

Rather off-topic: I can't believe that Kim Bruning was insisting that Jonny copy and paste. I figured out not too long ago that doing that goes against the GFDL license by disconnecting the contributions from the contributors. To think that maniac Kim ran for the Board at one point and he didn't know the legal and ethical implications of copying and pasting? Sorry for the off-topicness. As you were gentleman and ladies.

Actually, my encounter with Kim Bruning does provide a hint of coming strange distractors, since he was the one who introduced me to the WP:EC (Escape Clauses) of WP:NIB (Nothing Is Binding) and WP:IARDEE IAR IAR by virtue or maybe by vice of the fact that he habitually invoked them — most notoriously during our run-ins at WP:NOR, WP:SIMP, and WP:VAIN — whenever he found himself cornered by some Hoary Whispered Geist Of A Rool and needed to WP:BvM (Baron von Münchhausen) himself out of its sφear of inφluence.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

Pedantic Scholiasm. The way I remember the word iatrogenic — Geek for «caused by iatollahs» — being used in psychiatry, it simply meant "caused by the healer", and so you have to say "iatrogenic disease" if you mean a bad thing caused by the healer (more generally, a teacher or a practitioner of any kind).

This seems to suggest Illich's writings from the 60s and 70s. I have been thinking about what Tools for Conviviality might have to say about wikis in general and WP specifically. Does this ever come up in your Inquiry discussions?

I have been digging up some of my old books from the 60's and 70's. I started out in Math and Physics but eventually went on the Grand Tour through Communications, Psychology, and Philosophy, finally ending up in an Experimental Liberal Arts College that we called our «Rad-Lib Arts College», Just 'n' Moral. This had been founded on principles of Integrative Cross-Cultural Education borrowed from all over — Dewey, Freire, Illich, Jung, Laing, Perls — but I remember especially the Lit-Film-Writing course called «Inquiry and Expression», the «Integrative Studies in Philosophy», and a year long immersion in the origins, manifestations, structures, and re-evaluations of mythic beliefs called «The Waking of Myth».

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

Before I wander too far afield down memory lane, I will try to remember that one of our outstanding tasks on several threads is to clarify the actual meaning in practice of that gagabyte tattoo of WP:RULES that your dyed and blue Wikipediot e-blazons on its slim excuse for a Person and e-brandishes like a flaming, er, sword on every ritual occasion. (On afterthought, given its evident delibility, maybe it's really more like a collection of those washable cartoon transfers that we used to get with bubble gum when I was a kid — Yikes! a bridge too far down Rue Temps Perdu …)

Where was I ???

Right — the function and meaning of WP:RULE as she is spoke in actual operation.

My Thesis. Wikipedia Policy Pages, in their Con∑ate Acronymaniac Majesty, are far less often used as Anticipatory Planning Templates (APT's) than mentioned as Post Hoc Excuses And Rationalizations (PHEAR's).

And Dat's Da Truth !!!

Anyone who doubts this thesis is hereby assigned the homework exercise of visiting the Wikienlist for November, making a histogram of all the times when JzG uses the termsofart «ban», «drama», «play nice», «troll» — and any other items of Wikipediot Baby Babble that come to mind as you run throught the exercise — and assessing what percentage of the time he uses those words solely as argument stoppers, as rhetorical punctuations for actions that he took first and cooked up the reasons for later.

That'll teach ya …

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

That's similar to the thesis I put forward last August...

Wikipedia is a rule-driven system, so participating in Wikipedia is a lot like playing chess. Every move can be challenged if the challenger can cite a rule that the move violates. That makes every participant both a player and a self-appointed referee. As a result, some Wikipedians become very adept at gaming the system. They don't participate with an ethic of crafting accurate articles in a responsible manner, but with the personal goal of winning the match. Of course the outcome of any rule-driven game is arbitrary. It just depends on which player is better at citing the rules. When this practice is combined with the tendency to cherry-pick which reported claims found in the legitimate press to elevate to the unwarranted status of facthood, one finds a miasma of half-truths, misinformation, unwarranted inferences, and political spin-doctoring masquerading as verified fact.

Back in August, I was being generous in characterizing the WP:HodgePodge as WP:Rules, since they aren't particularly well-defined, uniformly applied, or self-consistent.

That's similar to the thesis I put forward last August …

Wikipedia is a rule-driven system, so participating in Wikipedia is a lot like playing chess. Every move can be challenged if the challenger can cite a rule that the move violates. That makes every participant both a player and a self-appointed referee. As a result, some Wikipedians become very adept at gaming the system. They don't participate with an ethic of crafting accurate articles in a responsible manner, but with the personal goal of winning the match. Of course the outcome of any rule-driven game is arbitrary. It just depends on which player is better at citing the rules. When this practice is combined with the tendency to cherry-pick which reported claims found in the legitimate press to elevate to the unwarranted status of facthood, one finds a miasma of half-truths, misinformation, unwarranted inferences, and political spin-doctoring masquerading as verified fact.

Back in August, I was being generous in characterizing the WP:HodgePodge as WP:Rules, since they aren't particularly well-defined, uniformly applied, or self-consistent.

Look, Alice, words are elastic in their semantics, and if you want to call playing croquet with pink flamingoes for mallets a rule-driven system, then warn us ahead of time and we'll all know how much Spandexâ„¢ you need to cover your Lex-ipodâ„¢.

Otherwise, something is bound to ¤Snap¤Crackle¤Pop¤™

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

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I would like to repeat my suggestion that we have a separate forum for discussing specific policy issues. Not having a forum specifically dedicated to policy issues is one of the reasons that every discussion of policy tends to veer off into a discussion of personalities. I realize that personality, and the question of whether Wikipediots have any, is far more thrilling a topic than policy, and the question of whether Wikipedia has any, but someone's gotta do the duller jobs around here, so I guess I'm self-nominated.

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

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

While I agree with your descriptions, I disagree with your analogy with chess. In chess the rules are absolute, no interpretations no way of ignoring them, twisting them (I mean in the professional level, but even amateurs)...

On Wikipedia on the other hand, pieces are changed in the middle of the game in an unrully way, rules on the possible position permitted for each pieces are reinterpreted etc.

That's similar to the thesis I put forward last August...

Wikipedia is a rule-driven system, so participating in Wikipedia is a lot like playing chess. Every move can be challenged if the challenger can cite a rule that the move violates. That makes every participant both a player and a self-appointed referee. As a result, some Wikipedians become very adept at gaming the system. They don't participate with an ethic of crafting accurate articles in a responsible manner, but with the personal goal of winning the match. Of course the outcome of any rule-driven game is arbitrary. It just depends on which player is better at citing the rules. When this practice is combined with the tendency to cherry-pick which reported claims found in the legitimate press to elevate to the unwarranted status of facthood, one finds a miasma of half-truths, misinformation, unwarranted inferences, and political spin-doctoring masquerading as verified fact.

Back in August, I was being generous in characterizing the WP:HodgePodge as WP:Rules, since they aren't particularly well-defined, uniformly applied, or self-consistent.

I think it's clear that Wikipedia has no principles or policies in any proper sense of those words — what it has are pretenses of principles and pretenses of policies. The practices that we see there are worlds apart from what those pretenders would have us believe.

Viewed in historical perspective, the principles and policies that Wikipedians pretend to honor arose from the engagement of several different paradigms, philosophies, and purposes — some of them joining their concordant motives in concerted performance and others gnashing more than meshing their disparate drives.

On the one hand we find the Free Software Movement (FSM), the Open Source Ideal (OSI), and the Wiki Software Paradigm (WSP).

On the other hand we have the arrant array of projects co-foundered by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.

The collision of these two worlds, so much at odds with each other in their fundamental aims and means, has not been a pretty sight for all of those who have so long cherished the first set of values.

The trajectory of destruction cannot be halted at this point, but we may be able to learn something from observing the ongoing, all too fascinating train wreck of Wikipedia that will help us to engineer better conveyances of knowledge in the future.

Doing that depends on answering the question — you guessed it — «How did it come to this?»

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

Avoiding the same mistakes the next time depends on doing an adequate post mortem on Wikipedia.

What are the peculiar features of the Wikipedia belief system that are leading to its spectacular demise?

One of the things that I notice a lot is a peculiar form of dysfunction that arises from the psychological mechanisms of denial and repression. Various schools of psychology tell us in their sundry vocabularies that denying a truth — whether a truth about ourselves, a fact of human nature, or a force of nature — never comes to a good end. The truth will out, and all the more forcefully for being denied.

For example, take the espoused doctrine of Wikipedism that is constantly invoked as a justification for anonymity, to wit, the idea that «the value of a contribution lies in the contribution itself and not in the identity of the contributor».

Can anyone seriously believe that Wikipediots truly believe this?

The «wouldn't it be luverly» attractions of the doctrine are impossible to deny, and yet look around at the sorts of things that are currently eating up the lion's share of Wikipediot energies.

The loudest defenders of anonymous immunity from responsibility — for themselves — are the most relentless banshees when it comes to tracking down the identities of contributors who somehow or other got on their WP:BADSIDE. Nor can they see any contradiction with their own espoused doctrine if they summarily purge the others' contributions from the database, without even glancing at the putative value of the contributions themselves.

This is a clear case of what various schools of psychology call enantiodromia or the return of the repressed.

And it all comes about because some people pretend to believe something that they clearly do not really believe.

Jon Awbrey

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There is a concept in psychology and discovery learning which may variously be called dawning of awareness, awakening, realization, or epiphany.

Some discoveries come easily. Some are long-delayed.

What's fascinating about Wikipedia is the chaotic process by which myths, misconceptions, and other erratic beliefs come under the limelight.

In the annals of education, there is the legendary, if dangerous, role of midwifing the epiphany. It's one thing to play that role while mentoring an adolescent who is in the throes of Bildungsroman. It's quite another thing to play that role when the subject is an institutionalized collective of players laboring under a tragic misconception.

WR is something like the Greek Chorus -- playing the role of an engaged audience that's actually part of the play.

The WP Cabal is the main protagonist in this modern reprise of a classical Greek Tragedy -- an arrogant and hubristic figure who expects to play the role of Hero, but predictably stumbles and falls, and ends up being the Goat.

I wonder how many apologetic Dithyrambs must be crooned before the awakening process runs its course.