Questioning Authority • Evaluating Wikipedia Articles, NYT • The Learning Network Options

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Questioning Authority • Evaluating Wikipedia Articles

New York Times • The Learning Network
If Wikipedia is a collaborative project open to all, why are fewer than 15 percent of the site's …

[Jon Awbrey]

Re:
New York Times : Room for Debate
Where Are the Women in Wikipedia?
Henry Etzkowitz and Marina Ranga : Nerd Avoidance

Being an old-fangled Peirce-James-Dewey pragmatist, I strongly believe in a life of learning by doing.

And what I see the “Common 87% Man” doing and learning in Wikiputia is more than anything else an unexamined life of moral and intellectual cowardice.

Whether it's by nature or by accident I don't really care, but I can hardly help but rejoice that any fraction of humanity is spared that manner of learning by doing.

— Jon Awbrey • February 4, 2011 (8:18 pm)

[Jon Awbrey]

Re:
New York Times : Room for Debate
Where Are the Women in Wikipedia?
Henry Etzkowitz and Marina Ranga : Nerd Avoidance

Best Comment —

I'm a woman who contributed briefly to Wikipedia. What I found was that it was overrun [with] administrators who rivalled Robespierre in their humor quotient. Who the hell needs it? Not me. I don't mind a flame war once in a while, but the selfseriousness is too much.

I keep this in mind, by the way, when I read Wikipedia entries. The smartest people I've known have all been very funny, and Wikipedia is … not funny. So I assume that these things have been written by young shut-ins with a lot of time on their hands, and not really enough sense when it comes to proportion or how things go in life. Often the most useful things are the links.

— Amy • February 9, 2011 (5:48 pm)

[Milton Roe]

Best Comment —

I'm a woman who contributed briefly to Wikipedia. What I found was that it was overrun [with] administrators who rivalled Robespierre in their humor quotient. Who the hell needs it? Not me. I don't mind a flame war once in a while, but the selfseriousness is too much.

I keep this in mind, by the way, when I read Wikipedia entries. The smartest people I've known have all been very funny, and Wikipedia is … not funny. So I assume that these things have been written by young shut-ins with a lot of time on their hands, and not really enough sense when it comes to proportion or how things go in life. Often the most useful things are the links.

— Amy • February 9, 2011 (5:48 pm)

That is interesting, and I think we've all noticed much the same thing on WR. Wikipedia is a humor-free zone. The poor Fat Man Who Finally Was Kicked Out tried, erm, manfully on his TALK page to keep some sense of irony alive at WP, but it simply wasn't getting enough water and sun, and finally wilted and died. A chief difference between WR and WP is that humor is permitted on WR.

My own theory of humor (caution, OR), is that it's much like taste and smell in food, or pleasurable feelings during sex. Nature gave it to us for a purpose, and like all things evolution gave us, the purpose is survival and reproduction. Humor seems to be targetted at keeping us interested in raising our children with their LOOOONG childhoods, long after the sex is over. Humor is what children do, from slapstick to pratfall to malapropism. And irony is that mode we get into when talking about children, in which contrast what they don't know, with what they SHOULD and NEED to know. And it's endlessly entertaining.

For reasons related to their more primary role in child-care (at least young child care) I think women need humor like oxygen (if you find me a group of women having a conversation who are not in mourning, I will show you that they will be laughing about something), but some men are capable of existing entirely without humor. They are more interested in stories of achievement. Men like to organize into military-style groups where authority is arbitrary or based on skill with weapons, and that kind of a culture is usually outraged by most types of humor. Most military humor is enlisted men laughing at officers, as they try to be parents, but end up behaving like children. And it's a pretty cruel humor, as well.

What remains for men is a sort of practical-joke humor, which seems to involve putting other creatures (sometimes older male children, in manhood ordeals) into uncomfortable situations, then being amused at their struggles and perhaps pain in trying to escape (I am in mind of stories of Huron Native Americans who laughed uproariously, primarily when prisoners were being tortured). That's the one kind of humor that women don't enjoy as much, although they can if it's very, very gentle (I have seen mothers laugh at their own two-year-olds falling on their faces, but not if the child is hurt). Which is a shame, since (if you look carefully) the rather vicious practical joke is one kind of humor that you actually CAN find on Wikipedia. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif)

Plus, I admit that WP generates its own irony, but in order to see it spelled out without a lot of work, you have to go to Wikipedia Review. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/happy.gif)