FORUM WARNING [2] Division by zero (Line: 2933 of /srcsgcaop/boardclass.php) FORUM WARNING [2] Division by zero (Line: 2943 of /srcsgcaop/boardclass.php) Everybody’s reaction to Wikipedia has gotten warmer over time -
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QUOTE
* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement * Support participants and help recruit new participants * Help with effective communications * Support revenue-generating activities * Build and sustain participant morale * Build and support leaders * Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose * Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners * Support movement events and projects.
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QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 5:40pm)
QUOTE
* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement * Support participants and help recruit new participants * Help with effective communications * Support revenue-generating activities * Build and sustain participant morale * Build and support leaders * Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose * Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners * Support movement events and projects.
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QUOTE(WikiWatch @ Wed 4th August 2010, 2:25am)
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 5:40pm)
QUOTE
* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement * Support participants and help recruit new participants * Help with effective communications * Support revenue-generating activities * Build and sustain participant morale * Build and support leaders * Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose * Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners * Support movement events and projects.
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QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 3:40am)
QUOTE
* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement * Support participants and help recruit new participants * Help with effective communications * Support revenue-generating activities * Build and sustain participant morale * Build and support leaders * Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose * Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners * Support movement events and projects.
Your post was very inspiring, The Joy. In fact, it motivated a news commentary about the matter.
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I just noticed this. My response to Sue (we'll see if she posts it):
Sue,
I’m responding both to your general suggestion that Wikipedians come together and stop criticizing their leaders, and to this comment: “We subject each other to relentless scrutiny — criticizing our own leaders and supporters and activities, monitoring, speculating, worrying, and poking and prodding each other. All, frequently, in public. I’ve been trying to figure out why we’re like this.â€
The reason, of course, is that Wikipedia’s policymaking de facto takes the form of random conversation, ill-managed straw polls, and any “consensus†that results (or whatever someone can pass off as such). The conversation is subject to a zillion vague, easily manipulable rules. In such a governance situation, the only way to get your agenda passed is by intimidation, shouting down the opposition, etc.–in short, it’s mob rule. You shouldn’t be too surprised if what has been set up and perpetuated as a mob acts like a mob.
Your proposal, that there be less criticism of community leaders, will not be successful unless you change the basic constraints of the community. It sounds like a hint that people simply knuckle under to the leaders of the mob. Not only is that actually offensive to democratic sensibilities, it couldn’t possibly work.
The alternative–which won’t make things radically more polite, but maybe a little–is to start an actual legislative body, constrained by a community charter. Forcefully assert the fundamental injustice of the current policymaking/governance scheme, throw off your community’s ridiculous notions of a “benevolent monarch†and impossible “consensus,†and insist that there be a consitutional convention in which the rules governing policymaking are hammered out. Moreover, to avoid the fate of all one-party state, invite the formation of competing parties.
Then let constitutional democracy work its magic. The world’s knowledge deserves nothing less. Otherwise you are left with “the slum of all human knowledge,†I’m afraid.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Wed 4th August 2010, 10:21am)
The alternative–which won’t make things radically more polite, but maybe a little–is to start an actual legislative body, constrained by a community charter. Forcefully assert the fundamental injustice of the current policymaking/governance scheme, throw off your community’s ridiculous notions of a “benevolent monarch†and impossible “consensus,†and insist that there be a consitutional convention in which the rules governing policymaking are hammered out. Moreover, to avoid the fate of all one-party state, invite the formation of competing parties.
Well close. There already is an entity that is suppose to make important decisions about the project by discussion, planning and voting on binding decisions...the WMF Board of Trustees. Maybe someday they will transcend the endless Usenet-like recreation of all institutions and just get normal for a change. Of course the current composition of the board is too narrowly Wikipedian and not up to the task but at the end of the day that is where the change needs to come from.
Until then maybe a voting system utilizing base 7 and approved by a shaman from the amazonian rainforest?
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Here is what I submitted to Sue's blog...
"You may resist the invasion of armies, but you can't resist the invasion of ideas." —Victor Hugo
21st Century concepts of good governance comprise an idea whose time has come.
Sue, the Wikimedia Foundation has an unexploited and undeveloped opportunity to play a leadership role in promoting the highest ideals expressed in the WMF Mission Statement and Values Statement, of empowering and engaging scholars around the world to collect and develop high quality educational content for other students, educators, and scholars around the world.
The sum of all human knowledge includes some 4000 years of political history that we may call the Advance of Civilization.
Among those advances are fundamental concepts of Due Process, Civil Rights, Equal Protection, and Evidence-Based Judgments that represent the hardest fought gains in all of human history. Sue, I would like to see you and others in leadership positions at the Wikimedia Foundation embrace and demonstrate modern 21st Century concepts of good governance, beginning with a sincere and whole-hearted demonstration of the most fundamental and basic ideas of good government and managerial ethics.
A few years ago, Lar, Sam Korn, and others pointed out that Wikipedia does not do Due Process, which is why the oftimes erratic process of conflict resolution has been a perennial source of embarrasingly absurd political drama that frequently reprises some of the most famous episodes in the annals of human history.
It does not behoove the Foundation or its public projects to regress to atrociously anachronistic and totemic tribal practices that predate the advent of the Rule of Law.
The time has come, Sue, to evolve to 21st Century notions of good government, managerial ethics, and best practices for a donor-funded online educational outreach program.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 4th August 2010, 10:18pm)
Sue has released from moderation my post (reproduced above) as well as one from Somey.
Dang, I was really hoping she would delete that one, so I could add it to me list of rejected WP'er blog comments... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)
Admittedly, I wasn't being entirely honest either about the reason(s) Wikipedians don't generally identify themselves, despite the fact that they're supposed to be doing "charity work." Since I've never created a WP account myself, I keep forgetting that there's a paragraph or two on the "Make an account" page telling new users that it's not always a good idea to use their real names, or some such thing. That's still there, right? So they're basically just following instructions.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 4th August 2010, 11:25am)
QUOTE(The Joy @ Wed 4th August 2010, 3:40am)
QUOTE
* Work to create a favourable public image for the movement * Support participants and help recruit new participants * Help with effective communications * Support revenue-generating activities * Build and sustain participant morale * Build and support leaders * Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose * Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners * Support movement events and projects.
Your post was very inspiring, The Joy. In fact, it motivated a news commentary about the matter.
Well, thank you and you're welcome! I was looking for Stalin presiding over a Soviet march or even Hitler presiding over a Nazi parade. But I couldn't find a good one with Stalin, and, as for Hitler, I'd hate to take away Mr. Godwin's attention from the FBI's seal.
Like many people who write about Wikipedia from remote observation platforms, you appear to have very little acquaintance with the realities in the trenches. A very large number of people who criticize Wikipedia — voices you dismiss as “detractors†— do at least have the experience of those realities to inform their criticisms. They will neither be impressed by the devices of glowing rhetoric nor induced by yet another call to “circle the wagons†to ignore what they know of the atrocities in those trenches.
Now, I doubt if there’s any way you can go from Wiki-Princess to Wiki-Pauper and slum about incognito on the streets of your realm without very quickly being recognized — nor can I ethically wish that experience on anyone — but you might be able to bring your level of empirical information up to par by participating in The Wikipedia Review. Because it samples the same population as Wikipedia itself it can be a wild and woolly arena at times, but there are at least a few moderators of moderate good sense who try to maintain isolated pockets of decorum. So I leave that invitation open to you.
Like many people who write about Wikipedia from remote observation platforms, you appear to have very little acquaintance with the realities in the trenches. A very large number of people who criticize Wikipedia — voices you dismiss as “detractors†— do at least have the experience of those realities to inform their criticisms. They will neither be impressed by the devices of glowing rhetoric nor induced by yet another call to “circle the wagons†to ignore what they know of the atrocities in those trenches.
Now, I doubt if there’s any way you can go from Wiki-Princess to Wiki-Pauper and slum about incognito on the streets of your realm without very quickly being recognized — nor can I ethically wish that experience on anyone — but you might be able to bring your level of empirical information up to par by participating in The Wikipedia Review. Because it samples the same population as Wikipedia itself it can be a wild and woolly arena at times, but there are at least a few moderators of moderate good sense who try to maintain isolated pockets of decorum. So I leave that invitation open to you.
Sincerely,
Jon Awbrey
“Open†is just another word for take a number and go to hell …
My comment was tagged as â„– 21. It's been 24 hours and I see that the comment tagged â„– 22 has already been posted — doing the math, that's 6 comments posted out of 22 or more — you have to suspect that the other 16 or more were either all ads for \/|/-\â…â„ž/-\ or regarded by Ms. Gardner as equally valuable to “Da Causeâ€.
Well, that's what you get for not posting constructive criticism, but instead just swearing and suggesting unnatural acts. You vandals. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)
I'm sure that Wikipedia in general and Sue Gardner in particular, would be open to a sober adult discussion of WP's problems, without trying to censor them. Which is the reason why the Wikipedia Review can probably be shut down just about any time now.
Well, that's what you get for not posting constructive criticism, but instead just swearing and suggesting unnatural acts. You vandals. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)
I'm sure that Wikipedia would be open to a sober adult discussion of its problems without trying to censor them. Which is the reason why the Wikipedia Review can probably be shut down just about any time now.
Now, Milton, you Old WALL•E Scag, I'm sure it's just that our Community@Large commentaries inspire Sue Gardner to such depths of dark-nighted soul-searching that it takes her far longer to mediate on their moral and practical consequences than the smackering of yes-person soft-balls she gets from her Community In A Nut’shell.
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Fri 6th August 2010, 6:06am)
...you have to suspect that the other 16 or more were either all ads for \/|/-\â…â„ž/-\ or regarded by Ms. Gardner as equally valuable to “Da Causeâ€.
I don't know if you've ever operated a blog before, but it actually is entirely plausible that the other 16 comments were all ads for various "male-enhancement" products...
Having said that, one of the comments that did make it through was posted by a feller named Lars Aronsson.
QUOTE
...there are many who should be able do outreach work without writing Wikipedia. There are far more people who read Wikipedia than who write. Millions of people use the English Wikipedia, but only 40,000 make more than 5 edits in a regular month. For the Swedish Wikipedia, that is 1,000 regular editors and for smaller languages even fewer. As a comparison, there are 4 to 8 times more librarians than wikipedians. Add journalists, teachers and students, and we have far more regular readers than writers. These are our bigger community, and some of them should be able to help in the outreach.
So let me get this straight - they have trouble enough trying to ensure that the people they're actually familiar with aren't head-cases, political extremists and sex perverts (considering how many of them actually are); now this one wants to put people out there, to speak on behalf of the "movement," with whom they have no familiarity whatsoever? And he thinks they're really going to get some of them to actually do it?
… you have to suspect that the other 16 or more were either all ads for \/|/-\â…â„ž/-\ or regarded by Ms. Gardner as equally valuable to “Da Causeâ€.
I don't know if you've ever operated a blog before, but it actually is entirely plausible that the other 16 comments were all ads for various "male-enhancement" products …
Well, I do know of 1 out of 16 22 that wasn't.
But I really do sympathize — they've obviously got a lot more technololically over-inflated pricks already than they know what to do with …
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Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 7, 2010 at 3:40 AM
One of the core tools for the success of an enterprise is the faculty for sober self-evaluation.
Peter Senge, more than anyone, has written brilliantly on how to build a successful “Learning Organization†that continually strives for “Ethical Best Practices†that are the hallmark of successful organizations.
See Peter Senge’s seminal book, “The Fifth Discipline: The Theory and Practice of Learning Organizations.â€
Here, for example, are three core traits of successful Learning Organizations, according to Peter Senge:
1. Excel at seeing systems. Successful Learning Organizations recognize basic system phenomena everywhere — limits to success, shifting the burden to the intervener, accidental adversaries. In particular, they see the system independent of organizational boundaries.
2. Collaborate across boundaries with ease. Successful Learning Organizations know how to get the whole system in the room and respect the different interests and perspectives of all stakeholders, making it possible to build their social networks and realize breakthrough innovations.
3. Move easily from problem solving to creating. Fear and anxiety can definitely motivate action, but rarely does it encourage our best contributions or sustained effort. These leaders are both pragmatic – they’re always prototyping and experimenting – one definition of creating. Successful Learning Organizations are also oriented toward possibility, evoking inspiration and creativity throughout the system.
Sue, please take some time to examine the Five Disciplines that Peter Senge identifies as important faculties for any successful Learning Organization. The Five Disciplines are:
1. Personal Mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.
2. Mental Models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
3. Building Shared Vision is a practice of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.
4. Team Learning starts with dialogue, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine thinking together.
5. Systems Thinking is the Fifth Discipline that integrates the first four.
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It's very interesting when the barking dogs come out.
I first noticed this phenomenon in my own personal life some 28 years ago.
I had met a divorcee — a 36-yr old elementary school teacher — who would inexplicably become angry or defensive seemingly at random, with no discernible pattern to what set off the "barking dogs."
It turned out that she (and two other members of her nuclear family) suffered from Dyslexia, the upshot of which was that almost all of her learning was from direct personal experience, and almost none from reading. (She taught First Grade, so that most of the books she had to deal with in her professional life were books written for 6-yr olds.) Any time I ventured into a discussion of something that could only be known from reading a book, magazine, or newspaper, her barking dogs came out. It had not occurred to me that she had a reading disability because one wall of her living room was an expansive bookcase, filled with books that ranged far beyond any titles I was familiar with. If I would pull some book at random from her bookcase, she would invariably say something like, "Oh, I didn't like that book." It took me a long time to realize that her books were just for show and that she had not read any of them. My own personal collection of books was meager by comparison, but I had read almost every one that I owned. Eventually I realized that whenever I ventured into a subject where she had an undisclosed gap in her knowledge, her emotional state not only swung negative, it swung way negative.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 8th August 2010, 3:02am)
It's very interesting when the barking dogs come out.
I first noticed this phenomenon in my own personal life some 28 years ago.
I had met a divorcee — a 36-yr old elementary school teacher — who would inexplicably become angry or defensive seemingly at random, with no discernible pattern to what set off the "barking dogs."
It turned out that she (and two other members of her nuclear family) suffered from Dyslexia, the upshot of which was that almost all of her learning was from direct personal experience, and almost none from reading. (She taught First Grade, so that most of the books she had to deal with in her professional life were books written for 6-yr olds.) Any time I ventured into a discussion of something that could only be known from reading a book, magazine, or newspaper, her barking dogs came out. It had not occurred to me that she had a reading disability because one wall of her living room was an expansive bookcase, filled with books that ranged far beyond any titles I was familiar with. If I would pull some book at random from her bookcase, she would invariably say something like, "Oh, I didn't like that book." It took me a long time to realize that her books were just for show and that she had not read any of them. My own personal collection of books was meager by comparison, but I had read almost every one that I owned. Eventually I realized that whenever I ventured into a subject where she had an undisclosed gap in her knowledge, her emotional state not only swung negative, it swung way negative.
Interesting. I've seen the same thing with math illiteracy.
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 9th August 2010, 1:05pm)
Interesting. I've seen the same thing with math illiteracy.
Not surprisingly, this same person was not only math illiterate, she had more math anxiety than anyone I had ever met. I used to tutor math and physics in college, so I was used to working with students who were struggling with these subjects.
It was during one such tutoring session with this same person that really put me onto a theory connecting emotions to learning. She had gone back to the local community college to obtain a Masters in Education, so as to advance her teaching career. She had to take a required course called "Statistics for Education" and it was this course that brought out her extraordinarily high levels of math anxiety.
I have found it uncommonly difficult to submit constructive criticisms, no matter how tactfully worded they are.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, the denizens of Wikiculture label almost any feedback as a “personal attack†or as “trolling.â€
Such feedback is commonly dismissed, disregarded, or simply reverted in a manner that often borders on churlishness.
It is in these situations that social critics have traditionally turned to humor, including satire and parody, to communicate their message. It’s a folk theorem that when those in power don’t take their critics seriously, their critics turn to the art of ridicule.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 8th August 2010, 4:02am)
It's very interesting when the barking dogs come out.
I first noticed this phenomenon in my own personal life some 28 years ago.
I had met a divorcee — a 36-yr old elementary school teacher — who would inexplicably become angry or defensive seemingly at random, with no discernible pattern to what set off the "barking dogs."
It turned out that she (and two other members of her nuclear family) suffered from Dyslexia, the upshot of which was that almost all of her learning was from direct personal experience, and almost none from reading. (She taught First Grade, so that most of the books she had to deal with in her professional life were books written for 6-yr olds.) Any time I ventured into a discussion of something that could only be known from reading a book, magazine, or newspaper, her barking dogs came out. It had not occurred to me that she had a reading disability because one wall of her living room was an expansive bookcase, filled with books that ranged far beyond any titles I was familiar with. If I would pull some book at random from her bookcase, she would invariably say something like, "Oh, I didn't like that book." It took me a long time to realize that her books were just for show and that she had not read any of them. My own personal collection of books was meager by comparison, but I had read almost every one that I owned. Eventually I realized that whenever I ventured into a subject where she had an undisclosed gap in her knowledge, her emotional state not only swung negative, it swung way negative.
Funny, she explains it as your having a small penis.
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If Wikipedia critics want to try to get some more traction (while Sue is surely stretching things a bit to say that "everybody" has a better reaction to them now, it does seem to be true that critics have less weight in the outside conversations about Wikipedia these days than a few years ago when attacking Wikipedia was somewhat trendy in some circles), perhaps they should hope for a new wave of BADSITES-style attempts at suppressing criticism (Sue's talk of stopping all the bickering could possibly launch a trend that way). That sort of squelching of critics, of which there has been much less lately than around 2007 or so when the likes of SlimVirgin held a high degree of power, is something that gets even libertarian-oriented types (like myself) to start supporting the critic side of the various Wikipedia-related issues, which helps get that side some airing even in the tech press, sometimes trickling down to the mainstream media as well.
If Wikipedia critics want to try to get some more traction (while Sue is surely stretching things a bit to say that "everybody" has a better reaction to them now, it does seem to be true that critics have less weight in the outside conversations about Wikipedia these days than a few years ago when attacking Wikipedia was somewhat trendy in some circles), perhaps they should hope for a new wave of BADSITES-style attempts at suppressing criticism (Sue's talk of stopping all the bickering could possibly launch a trend that way). That sort of squelching of critics, of which there has been much less lately than around 2007 or so when the likes of SlimVirgin held a high degree of power, is something that gets even libertarian-oriented types (like myself) to start supporting the critic side of the various Wikipedia-related issues, which helps get that side some airing even in the tech press, sometimes trickling down to the mainstream media as well.
I don't see that anything has changed except the subtlety and the sneakiness of the squelching. Open suppression has become more covert, that's all.
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QUOTE(dtobias @ Mon 9th August 2010, 11:56am)
If Wikipedia critics want to try to get some more traction (while Sue is surely stretching things a bit to say that "everybody" has a better reaction to them now, it does seem to be true that critics have less weight in the outside conversations about Wikipedia these days than a few years ago when attacking Wikipedia was somewhat trendy in some circles), perhaps they should hope for a new wave of BADSITES-style attempts at suppressing criticism (Sue's talk of stopping all the bickering could possibly launch a trend that way). That sort of squelching of critics, of which there has been much less lately than around 2007 or so when the likes of SlimVirgin held a high degree of power, is something that gets even libertarian-oriented types (like myself) to start supporting the critic side of the various Wikipedia-related issues, which helps get that side some airing even in the tech press, sometimes trickling down to the mainstream media as well.
For the rest of your post though — at the risk of sounding truculent, I have to say that you talking about “poor and short-sighted choices†and how the critics “have so much to say†is exactly the kind of reflexive, unsubstantiated negativity I’m talking about. Substantive criticisms are of course legitimate and can be useful; it’s blanket overstatements that I find unhelpful. And more so than unhelpful, I find them kind of perplexing.
Being that I posted a substantive and specific criticism that is still waiting to be accepted...
QUOTE
Gregory Kohs says: Your comment is awaiting moderation. August 9, 2010 at 10:20 AM
I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Kort’s immediate comment here. As an example of feedback being dismissed, disregarded, or simply reverted… recently I volunteered to assist the Wikimedia Foundation with its “Research Committeeâ€. I’m a director of market research for a $52 billion company, having been responsible for the design and execution of about $10 million worth of research in my career. After my post to the Wikimedia mailing list was finally let through, a couple of responses were rather insulting toward me, and one comment suggested that I didn’t have enough peer-reviewed academic publishing under my belt to even be considered for this coveted volunteer committee.
...Sue can frankly stick it up her arachnid ass until that moment she accepts that comment off of moderation.
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Everybody’s reaction to Wikipedia has gotten warmer over time, as Wikipedia’s earned credibility
