Jimbo's lording over Wikiversity again, This time, Privatemusings gets the axe Options

[Abd]

I regret that the Wikipedia Review software does not allow me to layer contributions, or I could do something like I've done at the current Arbitration Enforcement discussion. It's really, really funny what's going on. I effectively retire, see the current RfAr/Clarification, and diff, and so they are now trying to figure out how to restrict me so I can't make more trouble, when all that was necessary was for a neutral admin to ask me whatever. And what's being proposed wouldn't have stopped me from doing what I was doing. All it took was Carcharoth opining that I'd violated my MYOB sanction, and it didn't matter that it was preposterous. Days before, I'd promised to comply with a clarification from any neutral admin, and I have no reason to think Carcharoth is out to get me. Having stopped all editing activity except the minimal as described, I'm thinking they really have gone mad. I'm not looking any more, except to pick up the links. I am no longer obligated, in any way, to respond to the insanity on Wikipedia, I've done all I could do, on-wiki. What a relief!

I've written extensively about that for a decade and a half. There is an art and practice of community building that I first began studying over twenty years ago. See, for example, this article on Community Building, documenting my views first articulated in 1994.

Nice. It contains some of the concepts I've been working with.

Before I abandoned hope at Wikiversity, one of your brighter students, Geoff Plourde, asked me a similar question. Together, he and I constructed this model of how WV might be changed for the better.

Well, an agreement is nice, again. What mechanisms would make this happen? In other words, the agreement was good. People will say it's good. They will even pledge to follow it. But if following it is too cumbersome, too difficult, becomes too boring, other aspects of life beckon, etc., what happens, and why are we surprised when it happens?

For reasons unbeknownst to me, the remaining participants at WV allowed the prevailing norms to drift in the opposite direction from those outlined in the above cites.

I'm rather isolated from academia; occasionally I meet and work to some extent with academics, it's mostly been about voting systems. What I see published in the field of decision-making technology is either over-complex and highly abstracted from practical reality, or very primitive. Perhaps I haven't seen the good stuff.

What seems to be missing is a practical knowledge of how to bring the best out of a community, long-term, sustainably. (Best means greatest common welfare, or most efficient and effective realization of a shared goal.) It's obviously a problem that human evolution faced, and systems evolved, and systems that worked well compared to others survived, and the others didn't. Some of this was built into "human nature," which is part "intrinsic," i.e., biological, genetic, and part a matter of tradition (which became law and formal process). There is a gap in what developed, a gap between small-scale process and what happens on a large scale.

A great deal is known and available about small-scale process. Basically, meet face-to-face with a common purpose, take the time to explore issues and differences, and consensus can be found, particularly if there are members (or invited facilitators) who know how to do it. It's a special skill.

But when the scale is large, these face-to-face meetings seem impossible. New England Town Meeting is a highly functional form of government when the town is small. Even in a small town, it breaks down if everyone shows up! But where those who care show up, and anyone can care, it works, and what makes it work even better is the fact that most of these people know each other, they talk together outside of Town Meeting. The real decision-making process is far more complex and sophisticated than the formal meeting structure, which itself follows deliberative process that is the common-law heritage of democratic societies. And which the wikiverse almost totally dumped, to its loss.

Small-scale tribal societies that maintained high levels of social unity could not compete with large-scale organized societies. Strong leaders were able to organize coherent activity across larger numbers of people, so while the consensus societies were individually stronger, the larger groups had so much more in the way of resources, human and otherwise, that they prevailed except in isolated areas. Hence the strong-leader model, which is still very, very prevalent, even democracies tend to use it. The United States decided to elect its King, and to restrain the King, but it's still largely a strong-leader model. Parliamentary systems of government represent more of a move toward democracy, with a prime minister -- it's still considered important to have a King -- being much more explicitly a servant of the parliament, an officer with dependent power, serving at will. If you made the parliament thoroughly and continuously representative, which could be done, it would be a true democracy, for the first time, on a large scale.

My work has been about realizing that the operating foundations of democracy are communication and the formation of consensus (which is a relative term, a measure, if you will, not an absolute, 100% consensus being an ideal goal, not a requirement; consensus begins at greater than 50% consent, the bare minimum, unstable and unreliable at the minimum), and that this can and should be separated from the levers of power. Power structures and advisory structures. In peer organizations, the ultimate power is in the peers, individually. Whatever they do coherently is what the "community" does. If they are asleep, those who are active will prevail. People need to sleep!

But if there is an emergency, if somehow the routine custodians of power are off on some dangerous tangent, is there a way for the community to wake itself up and act? There sure is! Friends call friends, they have direct contact information, they go and knock on the door, they rouse their neighbors.

To make this work on a large scale takes a bit of formalization, so that the network of connections can be seen and analyzed and lacunae found. That's what WP:PRX proposed. Not "voting."

But the Oligarchy greatly fears the formation of "cabals." They are aware that even a fairly small but well-organized "cabal" could dominate. They are aware that the ad-hoc structures of Wikipedia decision-making are highly vulnerable to the application of a very small amount of social pressure, an organized group could effectively rule or at least seriously disrupt. So it must try to prevent the formation of such groups. Hence the prohibition against canvassing, which prohibits the formation of broad consensus, because, to work on a large scale, the negotiation must be between groups. Wikipedia painted itself into a corner, and is actively preventing the formation of hybrid solutions.

The Wikipedia model is one of distributed decision-making. It's actually brilliant, but utterly inadequate if not contained within a structure that efficiently resolves disputes. The problem is not the distributed decision-making, but the lack of other structure that moderates it. I'm claiming that the "other structure" can be light, easy, and efficient. There are hints of the concept in WP:DR which implies slowly escalated dispute resolution. Two editors try to work out their dispute, and if they can't, they ask for a third opinion. Do Wikipedians realize that this works? That is absolutely the most neglected part of DR process. Formalize it, make it easily accessible, develop editors with the skills and stop the immediate escalation to high-level process while skipping basic steps, do what ArbComm demanded of me, but fails routinely to demand of the community. AN/I became largely unusable because that's where people start, when it should be, in fact, a highly filtered 911 for emergencies requiring immediate ad-hoc action and not deliberated decision. You don't have a 911 system where people call the number and are patched into the radio network that goes out to all police and emergency personnel! Who then argue over the call, with everyone else who decides to say something tossing it in. You have a filter, the 911 operator. Very simple to set up. And then administrators would start watching the page again!

There is a great deal more that can be written. Perhaps I should, indeed, start working on Wikiversity, though I'd want some guidance on that. The concepts I developed and am known for, outside, are of general application. They suggest ways of structuring communities that are efficient all the way down to very small ones, but they are designed to be scalable to any size. Yes, any size.

I'm talking about a formalization (and thus extension) of what already exists, but not in an easily documentable way to allow use for rapid formation and estimation of consensus. The formalization is minimal and not in any way confining or burdensome. There is hardly any maintenance cost, and the operational work is simply people who get along with each other communicating and discussing what interests them. It's decentralized with careful, filtered centralization.

The "agreement" you wrote, Moulton, requires some kind of organizational structure to ensure that the necessary attention is applied where needed. A collective wish is not enough. That's why it wasn't maintained, that direction. It falls away unless there is a core which maintains it. But how to have such a core without creating an oligarchy?

No way, probably, but if the oligarchy is directly connected to "those they serve," who do retain the right and power to act individually, it can be restrained and guided by the community consciousness.

Jimbo may be acting against what he sees as a corrupt or ineffective core. Is it? How would you know? Do what I'm suggesting, you will know, and so will he, and then you will make informed choices.

If there are irreconcilable differences, with large factions on either side, it's perfectly possible to fork, and it's even possible for the forks to cooperate for mutual benefit and larger public service. Should there be only one university in the world? Who would think that a good idea?

There should be only one (or one central coordinating structure) if it is operating on maximum consensus, such that there is no need for forks. But there still would be special needs, subprojects, if you will. Make it easy to fork! But, at the same time, make it easy to merge or cooperate. That's what external, independent, voluntary structures can do, if organized efficiently and in such a way that there is no reason not to join. "Joining" means connecting, but the connection can be through a filter that protects you from too much traffic.

Moulton, you gave up. The time was not ripe. But what about now?

[Moulton]

I've written extensively about that for a decade and a half. There is an art and practice of community building that I first began studying over twenty years ago. See, for example, this article on Community Building, documenting my views first articulated in 1994.

Nice. It contains some of the concepts I've been working with.

Those 1994 remarks reflect more than abstract concepts. By then, I had more than 5 years of direct experience with them in building an online learning community. I was reporting what I had found to be a workable and successful model.

Before I abandoned hope at Wikiversity, one of your brighter students, Geoff Plourde, asked me a similar question. Together, he and I constructed this model of how WV might be changed for the better.

Well, an agreement is nice, again. What mechanisms would make this happen? In other words, the agreement was good. People will say it's good. They will even pledge to follow it. But if following it is too cumbersome, too difficult, becomes too boring, other aspects of life beckon, etc., what happens, and why are we surprised when it happens?

People are much more likely to abide by their promises than to follow rules imposed by others, even if the content of the promises are substantially the same as the imposed rules. In the process of negotiating a community covenant, the members of the community take ownership of the responsibility for making their community work. More to the point, a well-crafted community covenant provides for a considerabley more peaceable process for dealing with breaches of expectations, compared to a rules-and-sanctions regime. Note that in Wikiculture, those enforcing the rules seem to have a curious appetite for administering sanctions in the wake of an apparent breach. As a result, the community progressively damages itself through a toxic process famously satirized by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Regarding issues of social choice and collective decision-making, are you aware of the work of Kenneth Arrow?

Moulton, you gave up. The time was not ripe. But what about now?

Now it's even bleaker at Wikiversity.

This post has been edited by Moulton: Fri 19th March 2010, 6:20pm

[SB_Johnny]

Perhaps if the cadre of disgruntled but otherwise conscientious scholars from WV migrate their work to WikiEducator, the prospects for everyone improve.

I cannot speak to the conditions that exist currently at WikiEducator (although judging from Leigh Blackall's comments, I suspect they are not ideal), but I find it difficult to believe that they cold be much worse than those at Wikiversity.

I'm not sure about other issues there, but I know they don't allow "Original Research". I'm under the impression it's probably closer to Wikibooks than Wikiversity in any case.

[Jon Awbrey]

It Ain't Disruptive If I Like It —

“Next up the panel of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Niklas Zennström (Skype, KaZaA, Joost), and Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) ponder the subject of "disruption" in relation to breaking old business models. When asked how he felt about busting the old encyclopedia model, Jimmy Wales responded, “I’m a bad man” …” — Technorati, 27 Jan 2010.

[Abd]

I've written extensively about that for a decade and a half. There is an art and practice of community building that I first began studying over twenty years ago. See, for example, this article on Community Building, documenting my views first articulated in 1994.

Nice. It contains some of the concepts I've been working with.

Those 1994 remarks reflect more than abstract concepts. By then, I had more than 5 years of direct experience with them in building an online learning community. I was reporting what I had found to be a workable and successful model.

Sure. Did you know that by that time I'd had lots of experience (much more than five years) doing community organization, had been a moderator at the W.E.L.L., and that when I wrote that the concepts were "nice," it wasn't a claim that they were "abstract"? I was, though, pointing out that these concepts without structure that makes them function are sometimes useless. I wasn't denying your experience at all. But I'd want to know more about how you made it work, and did it continue to work? Many efforts work fine for a few years until structural defects take their toll.

Before I abandoned hope at Wikiversity, one of your brighter students, Geoff Plourde, asked me a similar question. Together, he and I constructed this model of how WV might be changed for the better.

Well, an agreement is nice, again. What mechanisms would make this happen? In other words, the agreement was good. People will say it's good. They will even pledge to follow it. But if following it is too cumbersome, too difficult, becomes too boring, other aspects of life beckon, etc., what happens, and why are we surprised when it happens?

People are much more likely to abide by their promises than to follow rules imposed by others, even if the content of the promises are substantially the same as the imposed rules.

Of course. That's why seeking consensus can ultimately be efficient, if the process is not too difficult. It requires less maintenance.

In the process of negotiating a community covenant, the members of the community take ownership of the responsibility for making their community work.

Again, sure. But how to do this when the community has become large, how to maintain that connection so that consensus is living instead of a dead thing from the past, that's the question I'm addressing. It would seem you have in mind an ad-hoc process, the kind that works when a group is small. It can also work for a larger group if there is a functional core that enjoys broad consensus. But what happens as these people move on?

More to the point, a well-crafted community covenant provides for a considerabley more peaceable process for dealing with breaches of expectations, compared to a rules-and-sanctions regime. Note that in Wikiculture, those enforcing the rules seem to have a curious appetite for administering sanctions in the wake of an apparent breach. As a result, the community progressively damages itself through a toxic process famously satirized by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Again, of course. It's all predictable. Is there a way to avoid this? You do know, I presume, that there is a lot of entrenched pessimism on that. It's based on a very simple condition: if we don't know of any counterexamples, we may assume that there are none. We may assume this so strongly that we will assume any possible counterexample is impossible, and if we come across it, we will imagine reasons why it cannot work, and we will use these to reject it, even if those imaginations are nothing more than that, they are rationalizations for not troubling ourselves with new ideas. Again, this is all, in some ways, functional behavior. But it's limiting, and if nobody looks beyond these limitations, we are stuck.

Regarding issues of social choice and collective decision-making, are you aware of the work of Kenneth Arrow?

Funny you should ask. I wrote about a screenful about Arrow, in the post you are responding to, and the severe limitations of his work. It's not that Arrow was wrong, it's that he asked and answered a very narrow problem that has practically nothing to do with real decision-making process. I deleted this, because what I wrote was already too long and I'm making proposals that don't require discussing Arrow. You want to discuss Arrow, where? You are quite insightful, it could be useful. Wikiversity? Or are you blocked there?

Moulton, you gave up. The time was not ripe. But what about now?

Now it's even bleaker at Wikiversity.

Sure. That's the very opportunity, don't you think? As long as people could believe that if they did nothing, it would still be okay, they would not be exercised to do what's necessary. The problem really is that response to crisis can be too late, or, if somehow enough response is assembled, it's too narrowly focused. Instead of building systems to address crises, the work is just about "Jimbo is a tyrant" or something like that. Jimbo is actually irrelevant, I don't think I can say that enough. He's not the problem. The problem is the lack of community structure. Do you expect him to create it? Why? Very, very few people in his position even understand how to do it, much less expect that it would be better than anything he could personally do. He's got to see, I suspect, that WP is failing, he's frustrated and probably angry and ready to blame "trolls."

He was taking notes when I spoke at the New York Meetup last year. Looked like he was paying attention. But maybe he was doodling. He hasn't asked me about it, from which I can't conclude a lot. A functionary came up to me and complimented my ability to speak. I do have many decades of experience.... but I'm trying to communicate something that, in fact, seems to take about a year of exposure, minimum, before it even becomes possible for most people to get even a hint of it. A very few people get it immediately, or get part of it. Sometimes they get really excited, I try to calm them down. It's very simple, and, if it works, very easy. But "if it works" is really tricky. Someone has to try it! And nearly everyone wants that to be someone else. They'll join it if it's up and running. But will they get it up and running? Well, so far, very little has happened that way. Enough that I know it's possible, but not enough yet to have a demonstration project to point to where there has been clear success. But it costs nothing to try. It's not some difficult structure to build, requiring programming, meetings, conferences, though all of these could eventually happen. Not needed to begin.

[Abd]

It Ain't Disruptive If I Like It —

“Next up the panel of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Niklas Zennström (Skype, KaZaA, Joost), and Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) ponder the subject of "disruption" in relation to breaking old business models. When asked how he felt about busting the old encyclopedia model, Jimmy Wales responded, “I’m a bad man” …” — Technorati, 27 Jan 2010.

And the article says the panel agreed on:

certain things should be basic human rights: information, access to that information, and the ability to distribute it freely.

Which rights are useless if the information is biased, selected, or, in the other direction, completely unbiased and unselected. The internet made lots of information easily available, and Wikipedia did not actually add to that. Instead, Wikipedia is a filter, and filtering is very, very dangerous as well as very necessary. Jimbo set up an information filter, a device by which information filtering (what's "notable," which is a variety of "what's important?") could be controlled. In theory, Wikipedia defers to sources to determine notability, but there are two problems with this, one of them is really, really tough. The relatively easy one is that the process by which standards are applied can be biased, even if the standards are neutral. The solution was theoretically built into Wikipedia: consensus, but the understanding of consensus and the protections necessary to keep it unbiased were not created, and WP process was so horribly inefficient, not valuing volunteer time adequately, that it was unsustainable.

The tough problem is that what is published suffers from bias due to variations in available resources. A simple understanding of this would be that if you have money, you can make something notable. A more fundamental definition of notability would involve the number of humans who know a thing, but, as I said, I consider this a very tough problem. This problem, though, can also be addressed through consensus process. Wikipedia actually follows it to some degree, but in an utterly unreliable and chaotic way. Editors !voting at AfD who believe that a topic is notable may be able to Keep an article with weak sources. A true efficient consensus mechanism could harness this. If most of the editors in a field know a topic, if the experts know a topic, even if it's not published, it's notable in reality. There would still be RS problems, which could be addressed other ways. Early days, Wikipedians sometimes did original research, and it was accepted. Go to the registrar of births and look up a birth date. Call up a BLP subject and ask them a question, etc. Any print encyclopedia would do this kind of thing?! But the problems of determining whom to trust were considered too difficult to address....

[CharlotteWebb]

WikiEducator still has Erik the Rude to deal with, but he's a minor annoyance compared to the 24/7 ego trip of Jimmyland.

I actually had to check just now to make sure didn't really mean this guy (who may or may not be Mr. Brian G. Crawford).

[Moulton]

The online learning community that I worked on peaked in the mid-90s. I chronicled examples of our results here:

Bring a Candle, Not a Sparkler

The project is still online, but largely dormant now, as the participants have since grown up, graduated from school, and moved on with their adult lives and careers. Incidentally, Howard Rheingold wrote about it in one of the chapters of his book on The Virtual Community.

There probably isn't any point in discussing Arrow's Theorem, other than to note that the problem of designing an optimal social choice function has subtle challenges.

Regarding Wikiversity, Jimbo personally blocked me there two years ago, and purged the site of the content on Managerial Ethics that I had crafted there. I have since ported the deleted material to Google Knol.

In the course of that project, I introduced the concept of a Social Contract Community. As you may know, Wikversity did not see its way clear to adopt or employ that community model. Is it any wonder the site is now crumbling under the dictatorial intervention of Jimbo Wales?

[Abd]

The online learning community that I worked on peaked in the mid-90s. I chronicled examples of our results here:

Bring a Candle, Not a Sparkler

The project is still online, but largely dormant now, as the participants have since grown up, graduated from school, and moved on with their adult lives and careers. Incidentally, Howard Rheingold wrote about it in one of the chapters of his book on The Virtual Community.

I knew Rheingold... The fate of the project is normal. It's possible to build deeper communities that will last, I believe, unless they truly have no more enough function for independent existence (in which case they can be absorbed into a more active project.) But if robust decision-making structures that can survive large-scale disinterest don't exist, very little can be done. In practice, sometimes the last person with sufficient privilege will shut it down in a clean way, but I've seen there be, sometimes, no such person left, and no way to find one.

There probably isn't any point in discussing Arrow's Theorem, other than to note that the problem of designing an optimal social choice function has subtle challenges.

Sure. But an "optimal social choice function," by Arrow's standards, does not exist, and that's all he showed. His standards have almost nothing to do with actual social choice methods, and, further, his definitions were very restricted so that he could come up with his proof. It's been shown by Dhillon and Mertens, in a paper on Rational Utilitarianism, that there is, in fact, a unique amalgamation system that satisfies very slightly modified Arrovian conditions, which can be implemented as simply as by Approval Voting, choice of approval made through Von Neuman-Morganstern utilities. (Which is how people really make choices, individually and instinctively!) And real systems add required approval levels, most typically explicit "majority approval," most precisely requiring a single Yes/No question, reached through iteration, being even more sophisticated. Bottom line: any group using standard parliamentary procedure beats Arrow's theorem all to hell. Doesn't mean there are no problems, but the proof simply doesn't apply. And that it was thought to apply crippled voting system theory for decades, which almost entirely neglected the use of repeated ballot and the role of preference strength.

Regarding Wikiversity, Jimbo personally blocked me there two years ago, and purged the site of the content on Managerial Ethics that I had crafted there. I have since ported the deleted material to Google Knol.

My condolences. I know what it's like to pour your heart and soul into a project and then be rejected.... It's fundamentally stupid, and functional consensus organizations -- and these projects truly need consensus to work -- don't exclude anyone unless, really, they literally need to call the police. They do shut people up in narrow ways and in narrow situations. Look, if a member of a legislature stands up and starts shouting, the sergeant-at-arms carries the fellow out, gently, but as firmly as necessary. Actually expelling the member is way rare, as long as they behave most of the time. They would never expel a member for making biased arguments, making frivolous motions, or whatever, unless it was happening so continuously that it was impossible to conduct business, and the member refused to sit down as directed by the chair. Note that any member of an assembly can immediately appeal a ruling of the chair, ordinarily. If seconded, it goes to immediate vote, no discussion. It's very, very well known how to deal with "disruption" in a way that rigorously protects minorities. Wikipedia tossed all that experience and imagined it had found something better.

I proposed in the last RfAr I was involved in, that editors not debate proposals that had no expressed support, other than by the proposer. That's standard Robert's Rules: do not debate a motion that has not been seconded. This is the rule that does the most damage when neglected in informal process. If nobody is willing to second a motion, why waste time debating it? If I drop a tome on a Talk page, and nobody reads it, i.e., it is actually tl;dr, what harm has been done? Nobody is obligated, in fact, until maybe someone seconds it, and, more likely, someone who does read it and understands it puts up a shorter proposal that I'd second and, still, nobody needs to read it. I never objected to collapse of my talk page posts.

You should have seen them howl when I proposed this. Preposterous!!!

In the course of that project, I introduced the concept of a Social Contract Community. As you may know, Wikversity did not see its way clear to adopt or employ that community model. Is it any wonder the site is now crumbling under the dictatorial intervention of Jimbo Wales?

No, it's not. It's predictable, as one of the possible outcomes. But another is that the community wakes up and realizes that it actually has nearly all the power.

[Moulton]

Unfortunately, what really happened was attrition. And the few remaining after the first round of purges and pogroms eventually found themselves being marginalized. Given that Jimbo alienated Larry Sanger early on, it should come as no surprise that he demonstrated continuing hostility toward academics.

[Jon Awbrey]

Jimmy Wales on Disruptive Technology

Next up the panel of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Niklas Zennström (Skype, KaZaA, Joost), and Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) ponder the subject of "disruption" in relation to breaking old business models. When asked how he felt about busting the old encyclopedia model, Jimmy Wales responded, “I’m a bad man” … Technorati, 27 Jan 2010.

Cited by Jon Awbrey 18:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Jimbo's statement illustrates the fact that anything we do "disturbs the universe" (Freeman Dyson) to some degree, and it's equally trite but true to say that "life is an experiment" for all of us. Jimbo thinks he's a "bad man" in the nicest possible way, I'm guessing, and Wikipedians think that it's just tough luck for anyone who doesn't like their experiments with disruptive social-technical forms.

So firing those kinds of words back and forth does very little to settle the question of when a perturbance has crossed a line too far or when a rupture has ruptured something we'd like to preserve. Life, the experiment, is just not that simple.

Which brings us back to all the years and centuries and millennia that civilizations around and before us have devoted to saying what it means to be civil. Jon Awbrey 20:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

I tried linking to this but some agent along the way keeps adding an extra underscore character

Try this? — Okay, it looks like it's because of that subpage transclusion business.

Jon

[thekohser]

It Ain't Disruptive If I Like It —

“Next up the panel of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Niklas Zennström (Skype, KaZaA, Joost), and Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) ponder the subject of "disruption" in relation to breaking old business models. When asked how he felt about busting the old encyclopedia model, Jimmy Wales responded, “I’m a bad man” …” — Technorati, 27 Jan 2010.

Jon, we are on the exact same wavelength. As I got in my car this morning, I was thinking, "Didn't Jimbo recently participate on a panel, boasting and taunting about how disruptive was the Wikipedia that 'he and he alone' invented?"

I'll be damned, you found exactly what I was thinking of.

Jimbo is such a hypocrite, isn't he? No wonder three women in a row have told him to hit the road.

[Moulton]

Probably the most important kind of disruption is overthrowing a long-standing myth or misconception that has outlived its usefulness as an organizing principle for a culture.

A mature society is constantly in the process of examining (and occasionally overthrowing) myths and misconceptions that would otherwise lead it astray.

It's ironic that Jimbo considers WP so fragile that it cannot survive an academic analysis that might expose its inherent weaknesses.

[Moulton]

Speaking of disruptive technologies, let's hear it for Search Engine Cache.

[Subtle Bee]

Did anyone else enjoy Jim Wales' handwaving when asked under what authority he had acted, and subsequent transparent attempt at "mass hypnosis"?

You care about this project - you don't want it to become known as a haven for cranks and trolls. You won't want it to be hijacked by people who - trust me - will waste as many hours of your time in pointless argumentation about nonsense as you are willing to give them. What you want to do is set up policies...

The last time I heard someone so nakedly telling others what they do and don't think, it was a loudspeaker in the jungles of Guyana. Different Jim.

This post has been edited by Subtle Bee: Fri 19th March 2010, 11:43pm

[JWSchmidt]

Jim Wales:

You care about this project - you don't want it to become known as a haven for cranks and trolls. You won't want it to be hijacked by people who - trust me - will waste as many hours of your time in pointless argumentation about nonsense as you are willing to give them. What you want to do is set up policies...

I agree with Jimbo, as usual. All I can add is that the cranks and trolls who have disrupted Wikiversity are invading Wikimedians from other projects who do not respect what Wikiversity is. It has been problematical for Wikiversity to develop policies that would protect Wikiversity from Wikipedians because of what I call Wikipedia Disease.

Wikiversity nutjobs. I grew up near a giant oak tree that produced thousands of acorns every year. Strangely, no new oak trees ever grew under the existing tree. One year I gathered a big bag of acorns and threw them a short distance from the existing tree. Today there is a little grove of oak trees there. I'm tempted to say that Wikiversity simply cannot grow in the shade of Wikipedia, but I dislike this analogy...it makes the suppression of new growth seem like a perfectly natural phenomenon.

Disease model. Thus, I prefer the "Wikipedia Disease Model" for the troubles at Wikiversity. Wikiversity tried to become a unique wikiproject suited for scholarly learners who want to be free to explore their personal learning goals. However, from the first day, invaders from other Wikimedia projects, mainly Wikipedia, interfered in the development of Wikiversity. Can we be clear about what type of decease process exists? Part of the disease mechanism seems like an autoimmune disease. Wikipedia developed tools for protecting its encyclopedia articles from vandals (such as kids who add "wiki is gay" to articles). The available tools for repairing vandalism have been used to destroy Wikiversity learning projects and drive away honest learners. How does the "Wikimedia immune system" mistakenly attack its own participants and disrupt the development of its own projects such as Wikiversity?

I believe that a major part of the problem is that Wikipedia attracts POV pushers and participants who enjoy tormenting other participants. Particularly during the rapid growth phase of Wikipedia, many "vandal fighters" were allowed in; people who seldom contribute to content creation...they just like playing the role of wikicop. These mutant Wikimedians are like poorly-programmed killer T-cells. They become skilled at gaming the system and they often rise high in the Wikimedia power structure. A small project like Wikiversity is particularly defenseless against invasion by these clueless Wikimedians of destruction who have carried Wikipedia Disease into Wikiversity. Wikiversity attracts thoughtful learners who are disgusted by abusive administrators...it is far easier to leave Wikiversity than fight with invaders from Wikipedia...particularly when the invaders are supported by god (king).

For me, what is most interesting about the current invasion of Wikiversity by outsiders is that the same Wikiversity participants who two years ago collaborated with an outside invasion and executed a hostile takeover of the Wikiversity project are, this time around, talking about jumping ship. Maybe they have learned that they should never have collaborated with the abusive invaders who struck at Wikipedia in 2008. Of course, during the past two years Wikiversity has slid closer to the Wikipedia model. Soon, I fear, the only Wikiversity custodians remaining will be willing to bleat "two legs bad" or "two legs better!" upon command from Wikipedians.

First they came... ...

Is there no cure for Wikipedia Disease?

This post has been edited by JWSchmidt: Sat 20th March 2010, 1:09am

[GlassBeadGame]

Is there no cure for Wikipedia Disease?

Prompt disposal of the dead might help.



Guess who's the guy not covered in shit?

[Ottava]

Guess who's the guy not covered in shit?

I was pretty sure that there was no one left not buried in shit.

[GlassBeadGame]

Guess who's the guy not covered in shit?

I was pretty sure that there was no one left not buried in shit.

Watch the last five or ten seconds of the video for the brief cameo appearance.

[Ottava]

Guess who's the guy not covered in shit?

I was pretty sure that there was no one left not buried in shit.

Watch the last five or ten seconds of the video for the brief cameo appearance.

I meant us, humanity, the modern man, etc.