QUOTE(tarantino @ Tue 31st January 2012, 11:58pm)
lol at Silverseren.
And MONGO asks the anonymous gadfly
67.119.12.141QUOTE
while we're here chatting about socks, how about you start editing here with your regular username...not to be rude, but why the coverup since you seem otherwise to be contributing without malice and quite neutrally and you're not a newbie.-
No doubt that the IP is the "wp community-banned"
LossIsNotMore/
Nrcprm2026/
James Salsman. Which just goes to show, no one is really banned if they choose not to be.
Wikipedia has tossed away enormous resources by the "ban is a ban" mentality. I first encountered Salsman as an adverse editor, socking and working with the head of a political advocacy organization to own an article, and Salsman tried to get me blocked, and I managed to arrange it so that instead the ownership of the article was blown up, with about everyone in sight being blocked, including me, but I was quickly unblocked when the admin recognized what had been happening. However, Salsman went through a number of socks, and it was, in fact, possible to cooperate with him. Later, it turned out, he was involved with cold fusion, he ended up being an ally. Salsman had strong views, that's all. Wikipedia bans people with strong views, instead of engaging them in structure to find genuine consensus. The excuse, the belief, is that people with strong views cannot participate in consensus.
It's nonsense, it is, in fact, dangerous nonsense. In the real world, this is what maintains conflicts, the belief that the "other side" will obviously be unreasonable. You don't have real consensus unless the people with strong views have been *included.* And that normally takes facilitation. Diplomacy in the real world. A special skill, with its own technology. Missing from the Wikipedia structure. There is some lip service to it in dispute resolution procedures, but no clear recognition of what it takes. Among other things, consensus process typically takes *lots* of discussion, deep discussion, but Wikipedia, because of its roots, is averse to deep discussion.
As a result, instead of deep discussion, it gets massive messes with lots of sound-bite comments that never get to the root of things, except occasionally, almost by accident. Deep discussion will typically take place in small groups of interested people, facilitated if necessary. I was good at it, in fact, ArbComm did not examine my history before passing the MYOB ban that essentially made it impossible, any attempt to intervene in a dispute where I was neutral was, ipso facto, a ban violation. That was brilliant! And I was watched closely by a set of editors looking for anything that could be alleged, even if it was, itself, obviously and totally harmless at worst.
Wikipedia. It is what it is.