Meta-Templates For Meta-Con-Templation, If I've Said This Once, I'll Say It 10³ Times Options Rating

[Jonny Cache]

Blankity Blank : Boiler Plates

Some things, apparently — no matter how reluctantly — bear repeating, but I just can't bear trying to work up the creativity to find new ways of saying them anymore, so read my ellipsis …

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

On Accountability

Template 1

There is no right of anonymous speech.

Wikipediots need to get out of that Wikipedia Romper Room and spend some time in the Real World.

People allow pseudonyms in AA meetings and internet chat rooms, but if the members of that AA group or chat room start publishing a newspaper that impacts on anyone's real life, in or out of the group, then they abandon that courtesy once and for all.

Template 2

Try to get this straight —

1. If you insist on having an impact on another person's life — by word or by deed — then the person so impacted is going to ask Who Said That or Who Did That, and you have made it that person's business to find out.
2. People who live in the Real World do not use the words Harass or Stalk to describe an inquiry into the facts of the matter regarding Who Said That or Who Did That.
3. There are many situations under which the facts of the matter regarding Who Said That or Who Did That are None Of Your Damn Business, and people are quite right to tell you so.
4. But — and it's a BIG BUT — GOTO 1.

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

On Credit Where Credit Is Due

Diplomatic Reminder

The Obligation To Give Due Credit Inheres In The Use, You Φreaking Illiterate Two-Year Old Morons !!!

Industrial Strength

"The Obligation To Give Due Credit Inheres In The Use, You Φreaking Illiterate Two-Year Old Morons !!!" (J.Z. Guy, 2008).

Guy, Just Zis (2008), Mein Kampf, Wikipedia Plagiarism Φactory Punlications, Jimbo Wales (series ed.), Φloating Crap Game, Kalifornica.

Extended Essay

The deliberate destruction and distortion of records for the purpose of disguising plagiarism amounts to a conscious, concerted, collective effort to conceal the facts of who is using whose work. Condoning plagiarism and counseling people to commit further offenses only compounds the original offense, and the fact that Wikipediot Administrators lack the common sense and the grade-school education to know this right off is proof positive of their abject lack of ethical standards.

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

On Reciprocity : The Golden Rule

The Fatted λ Abstraction

The Names Have Been Blanked To Abstract The Lesson:

And maybe it'll snap _____ out of the fantasy world he lives in where no-one uses the information he publishes for any evil purposes.

Just Exactly Who Is The Biggest Blank On The Block?

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

On Dunder And Blixem

Wikipedia is irresponsible journalism and irresponsible scholarship

It begins with "editors" giving false names. It continues with influence peddling, organized plagiarism, and the stubborn persistence of false information. It ends with "administrators" bearing false witness against those who criticize it.

People who enter the Wikipedia compound and persist in asking the kinds of questions that responsible journalists and responsible scholars are just naturally bound to ask — they will find that their days in good favor are numbered, unless, of course they stop asking those questions and just "assume good faith".

If professional journalists and scholars don't start doing their jobs, and this means doing a whole lot more than duping Wikipediot Articles of Faith and recycling Wikipediot PR, then WikiPundits will soon be putting them out of those jobs.

So watch out for that …

Jon Awbrey

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[Jonny Cache]

Assorted Blog Comments

I am finding that each new blog I run across recycles pretty much the same old hash of clueless twitterings from Wikipediot Press Releases and P-Mis-R, so why should I waste any creativity on them, either — does a rhetorical question need to end with a question mark? At any rate — and you know it'll be slow — I'll collect a number of my more scintillating blog comments here in hopes of recycling them into ever more focused laser beams of simply irresistible wit and e-lightenment.

Read 'Em And Weep : Myths To Cry By

It may be necessary to create a separate thread for it eventually, but I'd like to start a dynamic page or two for collecting real-life examples of fond notions about Wikipedia that one finds are still being chanted like mindless mantras in the more clueless corners of the blogosphere. When we have done that, maybe we can begin a more systematic deconstruction of how they diverge from the reality of Wikipedia.

Links For Later Development —

Chronicle : Wired Campus ¤ Wikipedia's Founder Says the Site Has a Place in Academe

Your assertion-in-passing about “the online encyclopedia’s efforts to improve the quality of its articles” could do with a modicum of the proverbial “further research”.

One resource for that task, staffed by knowledgeable, if occasionally Rabelaisian, in-&-out-siders, is The Wikipedia Review.

Too much commentary on what students learn from Wikipedia stops with the content of articles and fails to examine what students learn from participating in the culture of Wikipedia.

Educators know that education is as much about process as it is about product. They understand that students “learn by doing”, by taking part in communities of practice. What do students learn by playing the Wikipedia online game? Answers to that question can be gleaned from those who have participated in the full range of Wikipedia activities and seen how it really operates beneath the surface. Those who wish to learn more, while escaping the troubles of personal participation, may sample the narratives and the occasional critical reflection that one finds at The Wikipedia Review.

The effects of using Wikipedia as a source of information is a research question.

The effects of participating more broadly in Wikipedian activities, from the editing game to the policy-making game, is another research question.

Even a bad source of information and a bad guide to the norms of research methodology can “up the ante on critical thinking and information literacy” — if the user is capable of reflecting on its deficiencies.

Whether Wikipedia helps or hinders the user in gaining that capacity is yet another research question.

From Wikipedia Review : Guide to Wikipedia for Reporters and Researchers

Educators are aware that learners have many different paths to knowledge. Among the most obvious are these:

1. Learning by being told.
2. Learning by doing things for oneself.
3. Learning by watching what others do.

What do people learn from participating in the full range of activities provided by the Wikipedia website, considered with regard to each of these modes?

Some of the questions that educational researchers would naturally think to ask about the Wikipedia experience are these:

1. What do people learn about the ethical norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?
2. What do people learn about the intellectual norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?

For example, questions that one might ask under the indicated headings are these:

{1 b} «What do people learn about the relative values of primary and secondary sources from reading the relevant policy pages in Wikipedia?»

{3 a} «What do people learn about plagiarism from watching what others do in Wikipedia?»

Chronicle : Wired Campus ¤ Can Google's New Open Encyclopedia Best Wikipedia?

The notion that “Wikipedia works by letting everyone write articles that are then often corrected by experts” is sadly out of keeping with the reality of Wikipedia, where articles created by knowledgeable authors are more likely to be degraded over time by hordes of inept users and power-tripping administrators who neither know nor care anything about the subject matters in question.

Dan Colman : OpenCulture ¤ Betting Against Google’s Answer to Wikipedia

The notion that “a community of writers focusing on the same text will correct one another and improve the overall product over time” or that “the final text becomes greater than the sum of its authors” is sadly out of keeping with the reality of Wikipedia, where articles created by knowledgeable authors are more likely to be degraded over time by hordes of inept users and power-tripping administrators who neither know nor care anything about the subject matters in question.

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

On Education

This Is Your Education On Wikipedia

What are the effects of the Wikipedia environment on the critical thinking, information literacy, and research skills of its participants?

Too much commentary on what students learn from Wikipedia stops with the content of articles and fails to examine what students learn from participating in the culture of Wikipedia.

Educators know that education is as much about process as it is about product. They understand that students “learn by doing”, by taking part in communities of practice. What do students learn by playing the Wikipedia online game? Answers to that question can be gleaned from those who have participated in the full range of Wikipedia activities and seen how it really operates beneath the surface. Those who wish to learn more, while escaping the troubles of personal participation, may sample the narratives and the occasional critical reflection that one finds at The Wikipedia Review.

The effects of using Wikipedia as a source of information is a research question.

The effects of participating more broadly in Wikipedian activities, from the editing game to the policy-making game, is another research question.

Even a bad source of information and a bad guide to the norms of research methodology can “up the ante on critical thinking and information literacy” — if the user is capable of reflecting on its deficiencies.

Whether Wikipedia helps or hinders the user in gaining that capacity is yet another research question.

Educators are aware that learners have many different paths to knowledge. Among the most obvious are these:

1. Learning by being told.
2. Learning by doing things for oneself.
3. Learning by watching what others do.

What do people learn from participating in the full range of activities provided by the Wikipedia website, considered with regard to each of these modes?

Some of the questions that educational researchers would naturally think to ask about the Wikipedia experience are these:

1. What do people learn about the ethical norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?
2. What do people learn about the intellectual norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?

For example, questions that one might ask under the indicated headings are these:

• {1 b} What do people learn about the relative values of primary and secondary sources from reading the relevant policy pages in Wikipedia?
• {3 a} What do people learn about plagiarism from watching what others do in Wikipedia?

See Wikipedia Review : Guide to Wikipedia for Reporters and Researchers for ongoing discussion.

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[Jonny Cache]

On Words And Their Meanings

Draft In Progress (DIP) —

Those of us who spend a lot of time Talking To Wikipedians know they have a habit of divorcing words from the meanings the rest of us know and love. Words like accuracy, balance, civility, community, consensus, due process, good faith, neutral, open, transparent, and pretty much anything else they find a need to use in their special way.

To Be Continued …

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

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[Jonny Cache]

On Plagiarism

I recognize that many people of good will — if not exactly good information — may be surprised that Wikipedia Leadership actively counsels and encourages plagiarism along with its other deceptive practices. I will therefore reserve this space to document the examples of false counsel that come from this quarter.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

The point, I believe, is to stop any of Amorrows new edits lasting in the form he added them. That doesn't stop others adding the exact same information in their own words. (indeed writing it in his words without indicating the source would be a GDFL vio).

— "Viridae", Wikipedia Administrator

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[Jon Awbrey]

Of Amateurs And Amateur-Asters

Essay 1

I confess that I have read only snippets of what Dawkins and Keen have said about amateurism in Wikipedia, but just from that sample there is something about it that doesn't quite ring true.

I think that it's this. Amateurs are not the dominant force in Wikipedia — amateurs are people who engage in a skilled activity for the pure love of doing it. I am such an amateur in many areas that I've studied as an avocation for decades, but my love of the subject draws me on to learn ever more about it, even when I can't get paid for it. I don't see many people like that in Wikipedia. At any rate, true amateurs like that seem to end up as the same kind of road-kill as experts and professionals, the common factor being that they are people who genuinely care about their chosen subjects.

There is some other motive that drives the dominant culture in Wikipedia that has nothing to do with loving a given subject area. There are those who evidently love exerting their will to power over a topic that they neither know nor love for its own sake. There are those who get their jollies from bashing another person over the head. But I do not count that as being the same thing at all.

What Wikipedia has spawned is a whole new species of sub-amateurs, even anti-amateurs. They are fighters not lovers.

And it shows …

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

Essay 2

That whole bit about the Cult Of The Amateur (COTA) has always been a mis-diagnosis of What's Wrong With Wikipedia (WWWW). Amateurs are, by definition and etymology, people who pursue a skilled activity purely for the love of doing it — those of you who are old enough to remember when the Olympics were for amateurs may know what I mean. Nothing about being an amateur says that you have to be an abject klutz at what you do, or despise people adept and lucky enough to get paid for doing it, or envy those with more experience and skill so badly that you refuse to learn what they know, or obstruct people from contributing in areas that you never bothered to learn about.

No, Wikipedia is the Cult Of The Incompetent (COTI), and the only way they know to make themselves feel better about their own dim place in the Sum Of Knowledge is by banning those who might teach them something.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

What can I say — grate minds think alike.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

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[Jon Awbrey]

Just in case someone gets the wrong idea, let me make the following things clear:

• I have not made any other person my agent to speak or act for me.
• I have no intention of entering into any private negotiations or personal arrangements with any representatives of Wikipedia Management.
• I am not asking Wikipedia Management for any personal favors, nor do I have any interest in cutting any private deals with agents of Wikipedia Management.

Experience has taught me that I need to say these things because Wikipediot agents have a persistent habit of pretending to hear you consent to things that you never consented to.

Jon Awbrey (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey:

[Jon Awbrey]

It's Not Just A River In Paris, Texas

Are you insane? I have 120 real names on Hivemind. There are 263,487 biographies of living people on Wikipedia. The typical BLP article on Wikipedia gives more info than I give for each name on Hivemind. Wikipedia lets any anonymous idiot waltz in and play with their articles. No one is allowed to play with Hivemind. Why are you more worried about Hivemind than about your own participation on Wikipedia? Are you insane?

And The Reign, It Gets In-Seine-Er Every Day

Could you update us on the current Hivemind stats?

Hivemind: 73
Oldhive (which was down for the last 12 months and linked from the bottom of Hivemind only last week): 58

A dozen or two names appear on both pages, which means they've been counted twice. I don't know how many exactly — you can check the username for each Oldhive entry and see if it is in the index on Hivemind. I should add that while the Oldhive page is historical, with dates indicated, and is therefore an "evergreen" page, many of the names on Hivemind were deleted because they are no longer active on Wikipedia, or no longer seemed interesting. There is tremendous turnover among Wikipedia editors for some reason.

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey:

[Jon Awbrey]

Anonymous Bosch

It so happens that Brandt is an excellent poker player with a mediocre hand. Wikipedia thought that it could ignore external realities, and Daniel Brandt is showing them that they can't.

You miss the point WW. The anonymity of WP Admins is precisely the criticism that is frequently made: that admins have power to fuck over other people's lives while screaming blue murder when their privacy is threatened. It doesn't wash anymore.

There's a larger problem not noticed by NewYorkBrad or Doc Glasgow or practically anybody else: If Wikipedia is so wonderful a project why does nearly everyone in positions of power insist on anonymity?

If I worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica as an editor or author then I'd put it front and center on my resume. I'd tell prospective clients and customers. I'd tell my family about it. I'd tell my former teachers. I'd put it on my weblog under my real name. I'd do this knowing that EB would stand right behind me to check and validate my scholarship against allcomers.

What is it about Wikipedia that causes the exact opposite psychological response? Because editing and adminning Wikipedia is nothing to be proud of, because Wikipedia is an affront to education, to scholarship and to the Enlightenment that spawned the notions of universal education from which the encyclopedic nostrum began.

Because to be associated with Wikipedia is not to be associated with some high moral principle but the very opposite — of the promotion of venality, political power games, historical revisionism, moral and intellectual cowardice, and the promotion of the notion that a confluence the opinions of ignoramuses constitutes an eventual path to Truth.

There is a reason why neither NewYorkBrad nor DocGlasgow put their names to Wikipedia — because Wikipedia is a source of shame. That's why they are so upset with Daniel Brandt for outing NYB. Because NYB doesn't want his family or his partners to be soiled with the terminal stench that Wikipedia is to the Internet. The problem isn't Brandt — the problem has to do with why NYB wouldn't put his name on Wikipedia in the first place.

So what we have in psychological terms is called Projection. Because Wikipedia is an affront, anyone who associates my real life with Wikipedia must be an affront as well.

[Jon Awbrey]

On Chatterbrains

Wikipedia is a Chat Room whose Chatters keep Chat Files on stuff.

We probably can't stop the Chatters of the Wikipedia Chat Room from keeping Chat Files on a whole lotta stuff, so long as the Chatters of the Wikipedia Chat Room plead The Right Of Free Speech (TROFS).

(Never mind that Pleading TROFS contradicts what some of the Chatters have put in the Chat File they call "WPISNOT" — after all, there is nothing that says that any of the Chatters in any Chat Room have to obey any of the stuff that any of the Chatters put in any of the Chat Files.)

However, there is a Slim Chance of keeping the Chatters from keeping Chat Files on Living People, at least, in such a way that their Chatter shows up at the top of Internet Search Engine Yields (ISEYs).

So we're working on that for the moment.

I hope that clears up some of the Chatter.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

What ŒΔΙΘΙΣ Said To The ΦΙΝΧ

The only thing I've learned from this Niche of the Web over the past four years is that you can't have intelligent discussions with Anonymous Cowards.

No matter how innocent the use of a pseudonym may seem at first, it is like a rancid bandage too long plastered over a gangrenous wound and too long unchanged to serve its original remedial purpose, hiding a hole in the soul where all the pus of deep unconscious infection abscesses and swells, until the whole festering fistula eventually undermines the integrity and intellect of even the most well-intentioned person.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

Anonymous Authority

For eight years now Wikipediots have been campaigning for the Public to grant them privileges that no one has had for a very long time — privileges that democratic societies long ago took back from the aristocrats who used to rule them before they took a notion to become democratic societies.

It ain't gonna happen, but like a lot of other things they are ignorant of, Wikipediots don't know that yet.

Public protests and publicity stunts are not forbidden as ways of trying to get what you want, but Wikipediots remain blitzfully unaware that no one but no one in the Real World is going to buy their argument that they should be accorded the unaccountable brand of anonymous authority they seem to think is due them.

Only Wikipediots are dumb enough to buy that argument.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

Educational Impact Statement

The educational impact of the Wikipedia game is found mainly in the playin', not in the paintball pointillism that makes up its article content. The articles are just so much shrubbery that the players hide behind as they play The Wikipedia Action Game (TWAG)â„¢.

Educators need to start asking themselves:

• What are the habits of citizenship and scholarship that students acquire by playing TWAG?

Note. I'll keep working on this précis until I find the right place to zing it.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey:

[Jon Awbrey]

Caching A Copy Here For Future Recycling —

Response to the Question : Is Anonymity Good Or Bad For Wikipedia?

The Question Is Whether WP's Irresponsibility Is Good For Society

I'm tempted to say "'Nuff Said", but maybe a bit of e-laboration wouldn't be out of place.

The question that people ought to be asking is not whether anonymity is good for Wikipedia, but whether Wikipedia's anonymity is good for Society.

Wikipedia is a place for social, moral, and intellectual adolescents, for people who haven't yet taken the step to a level of maturity where they naturally choose to take responsibility — for what they write and for how they treat other people.

There are plenty of reasons for having low pressure environments where people can escape, temporarily, from the pressures of full-fledged adult responsibility, so long as they can do that in a way that harms neither themselves nor others. That is why we have chat-rooms and holodecks. But a general purpose, wannabe reliable encyclopedia and all-round news source is not one of those places. Sadly, all too sadly, far too many Wikipediots have yet to learn the difference. Whether they know it or not, Wikipedia space cadets harm both themselves and others by staying too long in the moral and intellectual vacuum known as Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

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[Jon Awbrey]

On Scientism

The phenomenon of scientism is one of those topics that falls within the study of inquiry, so it is something that I had been examining long before I ever encountered its manifestations among certain cabals of Wikipediots.

Now, the very few articles on politics or religion or their surrounding arenas of discussion that I ever visited in Wikiputia were enough to tell me that no good could ever come of the unsound wiki-φury I found there, so I never ran into what some folks call the ID Cabal in all its full array and greater glory, but I do know the type from elsewhere in Wikipedia and from long acquaintance elsewhere in the real world.

There are people who know what scientific inquiry really demands of one who would live a life of inquiry, and there are people who worship the Flash-Frozen Idols Of Science for the same reason that these same people would have worshipped this or that ecclesiastical power in former times, to wit, or not, simply because it's the Biggest Bully On The Block at the present time. These fairweather friends of shiny science will desert science-in-the-rough just as soon as the going gets tough.

In case you hadn't noticed, the going is beginning to get tough …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

In Search Of Lost Time

5 Ways You Can Help Your Wikipedia Review

1. Scour the search engines for interesting blog posts or news articles on Wikipedia that our bots may have missed. There are often online pieces that pass this site by. If you find anything of interest, add it to the appropriate forum.
2. Register on digg.com. If an article out there on Wikipedia criticism catches your eye, then digg.com it. The Wikipedia Review has a digg.com account and you can scan through the list of articles dugg by that account if you wish. You can also digg The Review's own editorials if you like them, as they come up, to give other readers an opportunity to discover them.
3. Browse through The Review's vast back catalog for thoughtful or plain interesting stand-alone posts that could be future Wikipedia Review editorials. It doesn't matter how old the posts are, nor even whether they are embedded within a thread or the lead post in a thread. Just identify posts you like and pass them on to Somey or a moderator. Also, keep an eye on new posts. If anything is particularly eye catching, make it known.
4. Spend some time working on an editorial of your own. If you'd like to make a point about something important, it may be worth taking that bit of extra time to get it right. When you've got something you are happy with, pass it on to Somey or a moderator, who can add a bit of mark-up if needed.
5. Make comments on external articles. If you come across an article that makes an astute point about Wikipedia, or carries something you disagree with, make sure they know about it in their comment section. Direct them back here if you wish. Thekohsher is the demon of the post article comments section. If you want to make a comment yourself, you'll probably find him already there! Join him!

Really now, why bother?

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

Looking back over the time since these suggestions were posted, I can say that I have tried at least a couple of these strategies, but I continue to experience a sense of futility about the future of The Wikipedia Review, especially when it comes to the quality of the criticism exercised here.

As a person who hardly ever bothered with the usual brands of e-journalism on the web, it took me a while to develop a style for commenting on blogs that seemed to work fairly well, and I posted a lot of links back to WR in the process. Frankly, though, I frequently end up kicking myself for having issued such invitations under my real name. Posting a link back to the Review is the kind of act that induces me to view this place as it might be seen with the eyes of others — and a large percentage of the time I am honestly embarrassed by the level of discussion that I find myself seeing here from that perspective.

The Meta-Discussion Forum looked like it might be a way to retrospect on the Review's back catalog and, more importantly, to look beyond the spellbound delusion of so many observers that Wikipedia is The Only Game In Town. But the condition of paralysis and transfixation is far too refractory for a small number of critical reflectors to break.

I would have to say that 95% of the discussion at The Wikipedia Review conveys no information, much less insight. Most of it consists of the same population of infantile minds that we find at Wikipedia repeating the same infantile fantasies that we find there. Most of the messages that pass for concrete data and news of the day are completely predictable on general principles already well-established — for instance, the rule that Every Abuse That Can Occur Does Occur (EATCODO). Indeed, many participants who I once regarded as having some modicum of insight into the social phenomena and the systematic problems presented by Wikipedia appear to be undergoing a regression into cluelessness.

Not a pretty picture but, I think, an accurate one.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

This post and the next are a couple of memorable — well, I remember them, anyway — comments that I posted in response to a column by Padraig Reidy in The Guardian.

View the article

de ja vu
all over again
all over again
all over again

de ja vu
a lover again
a lover again
a lover again

de ja vu
a lover o' gain
a lover o' gain
a lover o' gain

yet another yet another yet another month long munch song much wrong
spate of same ol same ol same ol nooz 2 riddle a diddle a widdle body bout
duh oh so oh so oh so good intentions o' jimbo come to come to come to zip

and you fall for it every time …

Ja³

Short Version. Technoir Journalists need to start reading The Wikipedia Review if they want to stay ahead of the curve on Jimbo UnLtd's latest con. These "new" proposals, the seasonal reruns of flags that get sent up the flagpole on a recurring basis — in the shape they are currently coming through the Wikipediot wringer — will actually make things worse than before. Surprise, surprise.

Jon Awbrey
29 Jan 2009, 1:09pm

Da Guardian responds with its Costumary Drumbeat of Ante-Censorship "Comment Is Free" Hypocrisy: "This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted."

[Jon Awbrey]

How Wikipedia Is Putting The Existence Of A Free Press At Risk

Wikipedia has shown us that a mass medium can be rendered so plastic and so well-leveraged that any part of it can be manipulated by a relatively small number of people, in ways that defy a free society's usual means to guard against it, so long as the special interests in question have a moderate amount of resources and the will to do so. If there are portions of the content that remain untouched, it is for two reasons only: (1) no one has conceived a stake in them yet, (2) virgin forest makes for good cover.

If you're thinking that Wikipedia is the Latest Thing in Blows Against The Empire, then you have a DoubleThink coming.

Jon Awbrey, Comment in The Guardian, 30 Jan 2009, 2:02am

[Jon Awbrey]

¤ ¡Advertencia! ¤

¤ Attenzione! ¤

¤ Aviso! ¤

¤ Warning! ¤

¤ Warnung! ¤

Lectures from Wikipediots on Civility, Compliance with Rules, and Consistency of Policies are Likely to Inspire Profanity on these Premises

Continue At Your Own Risk

Ja Ja (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/boing.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

Wikipediots are soooooo sensitive when it's their lives on the line — the merest possibility that screwing with other people's lives might have some repercussions on their own sends them into Wiki-Paroxysms of outrage. If only they had the capacity of normal human beings to turn that sensitivity around and see how it looks from the other guy's shoes they might never have gotten themselves into such a fix in the first place.

But Noooooo …

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

On the World's Chief Supplier of Industrial Strength Spitballs

The WMF clings to its BLPs with the hopeless tenacity of an addict to a drug. It's difficult to understand why.

What really puzzles me is why semi-intelligent people keep puzzling about this, when the answer is too obvious to bother mentioning again. I think the answer — to the meta-puzzle, I said the answer to the object puzzle was too obvious to bother mentioning again — must lie somewhere in the theory of cognitive dissonance.

The theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that people who regard themselves as reasonably intelligent will eventually find themselves puzzled as to why they wasted so much time on what they eventually realize is a totally futile activity — and with utterly insufficient reward to boot — and their self-image of themselves as intelligent persons will then cause them to make up some bogus explanation for why they did that. Invoking Cosmic Archetypes, the Greater Glory of the <pick one> Tribe, Cave, Market, or Theatre, the Interests of Science, or the Tragicomic Sense(lessness) of Life are popular sources of dramatic hamburger-helper, but I'm sure you have your own personal favour-rites.

Jon Awbrey

[Jon Awbrey]

Concluding Unsympathetic Postscript

For my part, Wikipedia represents the antithesis of everything that I've learned about education, ethics, information, research, and scholarship over a lifetime of inquiry.

Is there good content in Wikipedia? Sure. I put some there myself and so have many other people of good will — people who are as naive today as I was once — but I have seen how quickly that quality degrades over time as people of experience get chased off or worn down to tears.

But here is one thing you should not forget — all of that good content is parasitic on prior traditions of research and scholarship that the Wiki-Parasite is destroying as quickly as it feeds off its Host.

In my own education I learned that there is a lot more to Knowledge than accumulating a Fact Dump, that the facts of the day rot and decay without living traditions of inquiry to supply and sustain them. The disciplines of analysis and experimentation, the methods of inference and proof, the procedures of research and scholarship must not be short-circuited and shunted to one side in the rush to deliver a product.

I do not know, and do not care, if Ben Franklin counts as Left-Wing or Right-Wing these days, but he comprehended better than most that the viability of a democratic society crucially depends on a Public that is well-educated and well-informed. Wikipedia founds itself on falsehoods, and no good can come of that in the end. It puts our whole way of life at risk.

Jon Awbrey (18 May 2009), Volokh Conspiracy Blog

[Jon Awbrey]

O Con All Ye Faithful

The inability to reflect on the premiss of a well-designed inductive spiel — to see it from the outside and know it for the iffiest of iffy propositions — that is the mark of every playable mark, and every working con or cult turns on its ability to aim its hook directly or indirectly to the heart of its mark.

[Jon Awbrey]

Anonymskulls

One of the supremest ironies in Wikipediocracy has got to be the fact that Wikipediots, who fantasize themselves such freedom fighters, are gradually brain-washing themselves and anyone else in their sphere of influence to pass from rebelling against the Known Establishment to blithely accepting the dictates and the snooping of the Anonymous Establishment.

Jon Awbrey

[dogbiscuit]

Anonymskulls

One of the supremest ironies in Wikipediocracy has got to be the fact that Wikipediots, who fantasize themselves such freedom fighters, are gradually brain-washing themselves and anyone else in their sphere of influence to pass from rebelling against the Known Establishment to blithely accepting the dictates and the snooping of the Anonymous Establishment.

Jon Awbrey

...aside from I think you can go further, as they do. It seems they do not blithely accept, they actively promote this, and become part of the mechanism of active suppression of dissent.

[Jon Awbrey]

Anonymskulls

One of the supremest ironies in Wikipediocracy has got to be the fact that Wikipediots, who fantasize themselves such freedom fighters, are gradually brain-washing themselves and anyone else in their sphere of influence to pass from rebelling against the Known Establishment to blithely accepting the dictates and the snooping of the Anonymous Establishment.

Jon Awbrey

It seems they do not blithely accept, they actively promote this, and become part of the mechanism of active suppression of dissent.

The next question is — Why would a person prefer this? What makes a mark a mark?

Ronald Reagan was a master at this. He ruled the U.S. for 3 to 5 terms by doing nothing more than giving people leave to believe whatever they most desperately wished to believe — so long as they gave him leave to do whatever he wished to do.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

τα δε μοι παθήματα μαθήματα γέγονε

FAIL № 1. Trying to de-convert cultists and fundamentalists is a waste of time. No accumulation of disconfirming evidence will ever touch the devoutly wishful beliefs of the consummate believer. The only hope of success — admittedly slim — will depend on bringing external attention and pressure to bear.

FAIL â„– 2. Focusing on content is a waste of time. Let's face it, hoaxes are funny. People chuckle, cluck their tongues, and move on to the next one. Unless it's U. But no one cares about U. Except maybe sometimes U.

I have come to realize that it's very difficult for some people to grasp the utter futility of FAIL № 2. That's probably because the alternative is so hard to contemplate — you have to look at process, you have to get other people to look at process, and analyzing process is hard.

My guess is that people will keep on keeping on — they just haven't suffered enough yet.

Jon Awbrey

[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)

[Jon Awbrey]

CS:POINT vs. WP:POINT

The Common Sense Point (CS:POINT) is this — any enterprise that fobs an insufficiently-tested product off on the Public may expect the Public to exercise its right to test that product itself, moreover, to demand appropriate revisions, recalls, or removals from the Public Space. This includes social-technical systems of the sort we see in Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey, 21 March 2010, 4:44 AM (DUT)

[Jon Awbrey]

◄ Wikipedism⇒Basic Lack Of Ethical Sense ►
â—„ WP:BLOES â–º

Anyone who bothers to read a small fraction of what longtime posters have been posting at The Wikipedia Review for lo! these many long years would grasp the fact that few of us have stomachs for taste-testing the ephemeral glut of Wikipediot produce so long as a single innocent was drawn, quartered, and cannibalized in the process.

[Jon Awbrey]

Open Invitation to Closed Minds

Jon Awbrey says:
(Your comment is awaiting moderation.)
August 5, 2010 at 5:00 AM

Dear Ms. Gardner,

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

[Jon Awbrey]

Wikipedia is now one of the most oppressive, regressive, and stultifying environments on the Web. Spend enough time there and you steadily lose the ability to think — critically, not to mention creatively. The game becomes so all-consuming that no one even remembers the purpose anymore. Sure, they mouth the words like good robotic wiki-parrots, but act in accord with the advertised aim? — fugettaboutit.

Jon (IMG:http://wikipediareview.com/stimg9x0b4fsr2/1/folder_post_icons/icon9.gif)

[Jon Awbrey]

Reciprocity

This is the thing that Wikipediots never get — that people react to Wikipediots in direct proportion to the way that Wikipediots act toward them. There are whole Wikipedia essays pretending to speculate on the motives of their “disrupters”, when it's perfectly clear to any outside observer what the motivation really is. All they'd have to do is ask — but that would mean treating their victims with humanity and respect, and that is something they refuse to do. So they just keep dancing around the simple truth because they don't want to acknowledge the reality of how they treat others.

[Jon Awbrey]

More On Education

Re: Casper Grathwohl, “Wikipedia Comes of Age”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 07 Jan 2011

Yes, it's true, I could repeat all of the things that I have written about Wikipediot Culture over the past 5 years, and all of it would still be true. All that's changed is that the danger to the minds of students and to society at large is even greater today than it was 10 years ago.

Though many emphasize content issues, that is only part of the story. Far worse is the mis-education in the ways of inquiry and the warping of personal character to which even the most well-intentioned participants are eventually subjected.

Academic researchers and journalists on all sides have let us down. They do little more than recycle Wikipediot PR and blow pretty bubbles of wishful theory that are wholly divorced from hard knocks observation of what actually happens on Wikipedia Island on a day to day basis. It begins to look like it may be a decade or so before the real effects of Wikipedia Culture begin to make an impact on the dreamy bubble worlds of academics and media hacks. It won't be pretty — let's hope it won't be too late.

— Jon Awbrey, 10 Jan 2011

[Jon Awbrey]

The issue for me is not censorship, or else I'd personally be choosing to err on the side of the ACLU if I had to err at all. The issues are things like Hostile Work Environment, Child Labor, Truth In Advertising, and the Definition of an Encyclopedia. I believe in the maximum rational freedom of artistic expression and scientific inquiry. That means we have to tolerate all sorts of crap in the world, but it doesn't mean you can have your favorite e-rotica as your screen-saver at work, it doesn't mean you can experiment on undergraduates without going through proper channels, and it doesn't mean you can e-tice children “volunteers” to work into the early AM with who knows or who cares what kinds of adult “volunteers” on your tax-advantaged “charity” project for free.

[Text]

Wikipediots are soooooo sensitive when it's their lives on the line — the merest possibility that screwing with other people's lives might have some repercussions on their own sends them into Wiki-Paroxysms of outrage. If only they had the capacity of normal human beings to turn that sensitivity around and see how it looks from the other guy's shoes they might never have gotten themselves into such a fix in the first place.

It's fun for a wikipediot to scratch graffiti on someone's head when nobody is looking. Only when their head gets scratched they yell.