Eric Ely Options

[carbuncle]

Apparently the superintendent of a school district in the good ol' US of A leaked information about a police investigation to the person being investigated, who was their employee (or something). Bearian, who plays a lawyer on television, writes a BLP about him so that this important piece of world history gets recorded. After some discussions elsewhere it gets nominated for deletion.

This seems like a very typical and uninteresting case, but it's got Jimbo involved now (and of course the "Article Rescue Squadron" are flying in to save it). I'm making popcorn.

[Somey]

Bearian is obviously trying to "move the goalposts" with this "essay"...

Well, you know they hate being thwarted. The next question is, will he merely threaten to quit, or actually do it? And how long will the bitter, resentful userpage goodbye message be?

Once the WikiMob has has a point of view imposed on it, "consensus" has no ability to rationalise and find that it has been misled. Everything must be turned into a conspiracy; any counter-intuitive answer must be the right one; dis-information must be free. (I like that last one).

It's blurb material! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

To be fair, though, many truths about Wikipedia are, in fact, counter-intuitive. I mean, even in this case, Bearian is right: Anything that might even be slightly interesting to a general audience about someone as "marginal" as Eric Ely - given the sensationalistic nature of modern media and the jaded, shock-me-some-more infoconsumers who support it - is going to be negative. It's also going to be inappropriately emphasized and blatantly unfair, but of course that matters little to someone like Mr. Bearian.

IMO, this is probably inherent to any collaborative endeavor that relies on jaded infoconsumers to act as gatekeepers. In effect, the lunatics are running the asylum, yada yada yada. The thing about lunatics is, when you thwart them, they don't stop or even change their approach all that much - they just keep at it.