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Posted by: tarantino

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242098183.shtml

Ira requests:

Posted by: Somey

Not bad, but Mr. Brad should know by now that high search engine rankings, and the impact they have on both content and on article subjects, are only part of the overall objection to Wikipedia. The negative impact on the publishing industry and academia are another, and on traditional culture in general. It's also helping to destroy the diversity of the web, foster an unaccountable anonymity subculture that's potentially dangerous to democracy, and cheapen intellectualism, among other things. Then there's the whole cultishness thing, WRT the actual users...

Still, I don't suppose it's worth complaining about - at least he's trying to be fair about the whole thing.

Posted by: the fieryangel

I can't count the number of times I've seen Greg K., Barry Kort or Jon Ambrey make a perfectly logical and well-thought-out comment on a blog only to have them be swamped with Wikipediots making ad hominem attacks and Pro-WP rhetoric attacks ad naseum. If Brad could keep the WP troops in order, none of this would happen. Since he's made this statement, this would seem to confirm this as fact.

One of the joys of Web 2.0, Brad, is that (like Wikipedia) any idiot can participate even if they're completely wrong. The only solution is to 1. moderate the comments or 2. turn them off.

If only WP would do this for BLP articles and ban those Wikipediots who place BLP violations on other sites as revenge, maybe the rest of the World would follow suit?

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

Also please bear in mind that I couldn't really address every possible critique or criticism of Wikipedia in a 1500-word introduction, or even in a week's worth of posts, which is what I have to work with. As previously promised, in one of my posts I will link to some criticism sites, including this one. I really am trying to be as balanced as I can, although I obviously don't share the entirely negative view of Wikipedia that you express.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

NYB's preemptively chastising, discounting and discouraging replies from WR on another forum is disrespectful to this site. I won't be troubling you over there, Mr. Brad.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

I fear I've been unclear there and/or misconstrued here. Replies on VC about the general issues I raise there are most welcome. What I was trying to head off was more along the lines of a long debate in a comment thread, which would be incomprehensible to the general readership over there, about whether User:X deserved to be desysopped, why User:Y shouldn't have been blocked, whether User:Z is government agent, etc. That remark was equally directed at Wikipedians as Reviewers, by the way.

Posted by: the fieryangel

That's just it, Brad: Somey's view of all of this isn't entirely negative, but centered in the "balanced criticism" mode that both Akahele and you seem to be striving for. He's just not wearing those nice "rose-colored glasses" that the Wikipediots seem to favor...

Posted by: Moulton

NYBrad's second installment is posted: http://volokh.com/posts/1242179591.shtml.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

My third post on Volokh is now up, for those interested. It's more about the BLP issue (and I will continue on that tomorrow as well). Most of the content will be old hat to Wikipedia Reviewers, but my goal is to raise the issues with and get comments from a wider audience.

Posted by: Cla68

Judging from the number of comments, it appears that that forum has a fairly large number of readers, so your message is reaching a lot of people.

Posted by: thekohser

Providing http://volokh.com/posts/1242270923.shtml generally helps, Brad.

I finally brought myself to http://volokh.com/posts/1242179591.shtml#583890 on the second installment. My rant will be familiar to those here at WR, but my goal is to raise the issues with and get comments from a wider audience. So far, not a single click-through to the study results page that I provided in my comment.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Skew You Too : The Styxie Wixie —

Ah, the never-ending Drek of Wikipediots —

To baldly go where none have met their lines before …

Jon

Posted by: Lar

When you speak of "balanced criticism" and Wikipediots in the same paragraph, it causes a cognitive dissonance.

As I've said before, you can be a critic without the pejorative/mocking appellations. In fact, you can be a **better** critic without them.

Posted by: dtobias

To some WR types, "balanced criticism" means to give fair coverage to everything from the criticisms that say "Wikipedia is evil and must be destroyed!" to the criticisms that say that Wikipedia is harmful and must be radically restructured, but might possibly be saved if most people associated with it are removed and its policies and practices changed beyond recognition. The "beyond-the-pale" viewpoints that actually mostly like Wikipedia have no place at this table, however.

Posted by: One

It's probably the most popular and influential law blog.http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/blog_rankings/ Widely known among legal academics, students, and professionals with spare time. I guess it will have to get along without certain butthurt reviewers.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Aside from a couple of cogent posts by Brandt and Kohs, the commentary on the VC Blog makes Fark and Slashdot look almost intelligent.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: thekohser

You're being a troll, Lar.

Posted by: tarantino

http://volokh.com/posts/1242270923.shtml#583937.

I think that people who spend a great deal of time writing http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%22Ken+Arromdee%22+%22sailor+moon%22&go=&form=QBLH and http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%22Ken+Arromdee%22+anime+%22fan+fiction%22&go=&form=QBRE are a little kooky.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Dies Iræ?

The first e-stallment I tried to read looked like the room filled up with Conserva-Mosquitoes, and it got way too hard reading while rotflaffing — all that Bee-Looney about Wikipedia being a hotbed of Liberalism —

Last time I sampled it, Brandt and Kohs had posted a lot of hard-knocks analysis and data that everyone else just ignored — big surprise that.

Jon

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

As previously promised, before I finish my guest blogging stint in a few days, I'll post links to here (both the board and the blog) and to Akihele, just so none can suggest that the purpose of my blogging there is to sugar-coat anything. I can't promise how many Volokh Conspiracy readers will follow the links, though: you can lead a horse to water, but .......

Apropos of nothing ... In one of the comment threads there, Mr. Brandt criticized the fact that I still haven't posted my real name on Wikipedia yet. Obviously, at this point I've decided to go ahead and make public that IBM=NYB, so at some point I'll probably post my name on my userpage, along with a couple of sentences of real-world bio (I'm a litigation attorney in New York, I'm the Werowance of the Wolfe Pack, etc.). I wonder exactly how long it will take before someone objects that I'm using Wikipedia for self-promotion.

Posted by: privatemusings

You're using Wikipedia for self-promotion.

do I get a prize?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Only Dead In The Head Wikipediots would suggest that a Standard Author Bio amounts to Self-Promotion, but never mind that now …

I tried to work up an offering for the VC Blog to share my initially parallel but increasingly divergent experiences with Wikipedia — I think most folks there would find it amusing that one of the events that led to my x-communication from Wikipedia was my objection to the use of "Wiki-Lawyer" as a pejorative term on the grounds that it defamed the legal profession, but never mind that now — still, it looks like that blog, however grounded it may be in one domain of experience, is like so many other Acadimmerungs of Νεφελοκοκκυγία that I have tried to educate in the past, that is, totally oblivious to the realities of Wikiputia, and where folks have their heads so full of gas about the way it's posed to be that they can't really see how it is.

And I don't see you adding much to the mix but ever more gas.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

Arromdee is actually http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/. Or at least with a http://www.io.com/~ksethre/akon/9/arromdee.JPG he looks smarter than he used to look. In fact, the http://web.archive.org/web/20060209215139/www.rahul.net/arromdee/resume.ascii says that he has a PhD in computer science. So we know that he's smart enough to tell the difference between a one and a zero.

(About that PhD, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, since we can no longer ask Essjay to check it out for us.)

But his comment was certainly stupid. With five minutes of research, he might have figured out that the reason I read NYB on VC is because NYB announced it, more than once, on that "kook" site Wikipedia Review. And believe it or not, some of the "kooks" here are actually a hell of a lot smarter than Arromdee. I can't write C-language code as well as Arromdee (but I get by), and I don't read comic books and don't follow anime, but at least I'm smart enough to know that I am, generally speaking, smarter than he is in a lot of other areas.

Posted by: Somey

Not if he worked on Peachtree Accounting from 2000 to 2004, he isn't. Yikes, what a mess! It's gotten a little better since then, though.

Still very difficult to integrate with...

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

One of the questions that always comes to mind when discussing ArbComics, stand-up or otherwise, is this —

How could any Wikipedian, much less a high ranking one, be sooooo clueless about the realities in the trenches of Wikipedia?

http://en.wikichecker.com/user/?t=Newyorkbrad&l=all

• 21,835 — Total Edits （25 Feb 2006 – 15 May 2009)
• 11,516 — Project, Help, MediaWiki, Portal
•  6,599 — User Talk
•  2,584 — Article Page
•    466 — Article Talk
•    428 — User Page
•    242 — Category, Image, Template

O I C …

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Well you forgot to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potent_potables.

Oh damn, it's been deleted.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Where the People all have Pyorrhea from eating too many Pomegranites …

Ja Ja

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

Well, yeah. When I started I contributed to mainspace, including having created more than 75 pages, but lately I've been focused primarily on arbitration and related activities.

Although I'm not denying the trend you see there, do bear in mind more generally that the pure edit-number data can be misleading. If I create a page in mainspace, that's one edit. If I then vote paragraph-by-paragraph through an arb decision, that can be 20 edits....

I am determined to get back to more article work once the current round of ArbCom cases is wrapped up and my guest-blogging stint on Volokh is completed. And I'm sure Mr. Awbrey will remind me if I forget, because making sure that there are lots of good contributions to Wikipedia mainspace is very important to him.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Well, few if any articles are created at the size of http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=247090972. I ran out of cigarettes about halfway through it.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Do what you like. I am simply stepping through the steps of the inquiry process, that begins by "abducing" an explanation for a surprising observation.

The surprising observation is that a presumably intelligent person could continue repeating the same old mythology about Wikipedia — after all these years — in the face of all the contrary evidence that spits in the face of every trooper who spends a long enough time in the trenches.

There are as many likely explanations as there are favorite ways of denying the evidence — I simply picked on a likely first guess.

Of course, it hardly amounts to a fair test anymore — a Modern Major General slumming in the trenches for a day is just not going to get dressed down for having lacquered brass, now is he?

So you really missed out on all that, poor sap …

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Ira's Song & Dance about BLPs trots out more old saws than I have old wood

So let me just give my first & last hoot on the subject:

I am putting a copy here because the Conspiracy Blogware is so antique it can take you 10 minutes to find your own posts again.

Jon

Posted by: Somey

If I understand this correctly, Mr. Awbrey is suggesting that Mr. Brad is too far removed from the realities of WP article-editing to fully understand how bad it can be for people with knowledge of a given subject to deal with the cluelessness and general interference than occurs on a fairly regular basis...?

That may be, but in Mr. Brad's defense, I've looked at his editing history without the benefit of a statistics generator, and IMO he's actually more like me, just on a different website. It isn't just that he uses the Preview button - he clearly tries to fully prepare articles in advance of their initial posting. That can indicate any number of things - meticulousness, mental organization, and most commonly of all, an attempt to avoid unwanted attention, particularly from people who might challenge the article's content or try to have it deleted. It's almost the opposite of the more attention-seeking narcissistic tendency to create new articles in as many edits as possible.

For example, take this relatively early-in-career stub: J. Daniel Mahoney (T-H-L-K-D). The initial edit is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=J._Daniel_Mahoney&oldid=68057917, with all links and such already in place. After that, NYB makes only one edit to the article, to add a "source" template.

OTOH, most of Mr. Brad's newly-created articles have been about various Federal judges, so there isn't a lot of variety in the stubs - they all follow a fairly similar format. That makes it a little easier to obtain a low ratio of edits to newly-created articles.

Unfortunately, on Wikipedia it's difficult to determine user motivation unless that ratio is very low - I suspect that many non-narcissistic people deliberately use more edits to post a new article than they would otherwise need or want, merely because they don't want to be left in the dust by the edit-countitis sufferers, and they can see that few people really look at the details.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Perfect Illustration of what I'm talking about

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=J._Daniel_Mahoney&action=history, which remains a stub to this day.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to find yourself slimmed, er, slammed up against the wall by the Cabal in the neighborhood of that kind of turf — we all know better than that — but it's nowhere near as likely as working on Pseudoscience (T-H-L-K-D), or Sigmund Freud (T-H-L-K-D), or Truth (T-H-L-K-D), or even Charles Sanders Peirce (T-H-L-K-D), if that is where they or their minions stalk you back to.

Do you really think I put over 400 edits into an article like http://wikidashboard.parc.com/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce# out of narcissism?

Give me a break …

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Somey

Heavens no! But you didn't create any of those articles... (This is the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Sanders_Peirce&oldid=242935 for the Peirce article, btw.)

There are all sorts of reasons why people use lots of edits to develop an article - in your case, I'd say it was more of a "practice what you preach" thing, given the communal/collaborative nature of Inquiry as you define it (and as evidenced in the development of the Inquiry (T-H-L-K-D) article itself, I might add, which is one of yours).

All I'm saying is that the tendency to want to keep edit-counts to a minimum for newly-created articles can be seen as indicating that the person is trying to avoid attention, which is a fairly evident non-narcissistic impulse. It could also mean that the person is a perfectionist - a mature-depressive tendency - or simply doesn't want to be seen by others as narcissistic, whether or not he/she actually is... but I suspect most people don't engage in that kind of double-bind thinking when they're about to post a WP article.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Actually, it wasn't a Creation but a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Sanders_Peirce&direction=prev&oldid=133656 from a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Conversion_script, but I don't really see why everything has to turn into a fight about Creationism …

Once again, the surprising observation under investigation is that a presumably intelligent person of presumptively good will is still repeating the Litany Of Lies (LOL) that we all know and many of us don't love so much as Wikipediot Doctrine.

If it was certain other people doing that, then the above-mentioned presumptions would be way too presumptuous, so we'd naturally have other explanations available to us.

The charitable interpretations in this case are:

1. Ira is extraordinarily blessed or gratuitously lucky.
2. Ira is blissfully lacking in the relevant experiences.

The relatively small exposure to editing in the trenches is weakly confirmatory of Hype № 2 — it is not itself the Phenom under investigation.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: dtobias

That somebody doesn't come out of their Wikipedia experiences with the same outlook as yours doesn't mean that they (or you) are wrong. Wikipedia is enough of a big and complex thing that people's experiences with it can be as diverse as the proverbial blind men feeling parts of an elephant.

Posted by: One

I agree.

I'm sure Reviewers notice all of the comments claiming that there's a left-wing bias on Wikipedia. Whatever else that claim is, it's at least an over-simplification. Parts of Wikipedia have a left-wing bias, an Israel bias, a promotional bias, and so forth. Some topics are abandoned garbage heaps, some are vicious partisan battle grounds, and others actually edit harmoniously.

The relevant question is whether Wikipedia can correct itself and more closely resemble the encyclopedia it supposedly aspires towards. I think people should harbor healthy skepticism about Wikipedia's chances of improving. At the same time, many casual contributors have had mostly positive experiences editing. Even at this late date they feel they're contributing to a useful compilation. There's nothing wrong with that.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

A well-known fact of life, no matter what we're talking about.

Which is precisely why inquiring minds come together, compare their diverse experiences, seek explanations for the divergent conclusions that different minds draw from their many-splintered POVs, and strive to synthesize a more inclusive picture of the reality that generates them all.

Oh wait, I just violated all the Main Tenets of the Church of Wikipedia, where it's so much Wikier just to ban the books and burn the heretics that displease the Wiki-Priests of the Hour.

Nevermind …

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Let's get something straight about the ass-sym-metrics of the situation —

I am not the one who shunned them and shut out their experience.

They are the ones who shunned me and shut out my experience.

Klar?

Jon

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Seven Days In May —

It's rather tricky keeping track of the disconnected blogicles and comments on that site, so I'll make a list here:

http://www.volokh.com/posts/chain_1242098183.shtml

1. Ira Matetsky (11 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242098183.shtml
2. Ira Matetsky (12 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242179591.shtml
3. Ira Matetsky (13 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242270923.shtml
4. Ira Matetsky (14 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242334561.shtml
5. Ira Matetsky (15 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242444024.shtml
6. Ira Matetsky (16 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242530186.shtml
7. Ira Matetsky (17 May 2009), http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242618845.shtml

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Comment on "Wikipedia : Who Runs The Place?" —

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym:

Posted by: Somey

That's Horologium (T-C-L-K-R-D) , another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger, using the classic but wait folks he isn't telling you that he's banned from Wikipedia!!! rejoinder.

Zzzzzz...

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

How did you know that? It's hard enough keeping up with pseudonyms without getting into meta-pseudonyms …

Jon

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

O I C …

Here's my followup —

They never seem to get the point …

I think they must have some sort of rule against it …

Posted by: dtobias

...not that there's anything wrong with that...

Posted by: Somey

Not necessarily, anyway. I shouldn't risk alienating any Volokh Conspiracy readers who may be checking out our helpful little website, but the sad fact of it is, there are a lot of Bush-baby Neocon Republicans out there painting themselves as "Independents" and "Libertarians" so that they can avoid the Bush Stigma™ whilst carrying on the fight for various aspects of the Anti-Obama, Anti-Abortion, Pro-Censorship, Anti-Gay, etc. etc., agenda. If I were one of those real libertarians who were into it before it was "cool," dutifully following the smaller-government, fiscal-responsibility agenda, I would be extremely pissed off about this. Unfortunately, there's probably very little they can really do about it.

Then again, maybe they can turn a few of those people into Ron Paul supporters, by getting them really, really drunk the night before Election Day?

Posted by: thekohser

Timekeeper was such a boob, I just http://volokh.com/posts/1242444024.shtml#585867.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Somey

Count yourself lucky, then! It may be that I encounter more people like that because I'm a businessman (just not a very successful one at the moment), and you're one of these Academia-with-a-capital-"A" guys. But these folks are definitely out there, trust me on that one...

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)


True... Sometimes I wonder, though, to what extent political ideologues take advantage of simple human nature, or maybe I should say good-natured humanity, to achieve their often-nefarious ends on WP. There's actually a Wikipedia article on something called the Abilene paradox (T-H-L-K-D) that sort of explains what I'm thinking here. At first it will probably seem completely inapplicable, because after all WP'ers argue with each other all the time - that's the whole point of WP, in fact - and yet, putting aside whatever specific issue they're arguing about, they're all pretty much in agreement that their participation there is worthwhile and that they should all continue doing it.

Posted by: emesee

so what you are perhaps saying is that even though on an individual basis they may have been attempting to do the right thing, due to interactions at the group level, perhaps, on an individual /and/ collective basis, all they could see was bad and worse choices?




perhaps.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Out there I'm sure they are — I'm just talking about our local garden variety and the fruits of all the blog'n'villas.

I think the dynamic must be something like this. Hooray for Individual Liberty! But Corporations are Individuals. Ergo, Hooray for Corporations! At any rate, this appears to be the "logic" of Randroids. Of course, any corporation that is owned by its workers instead of some Wind-In-The-Hair Aviator-Scarfed Smilin' Jackbooter Pointing The Way To That Shiny-Metal-Bot City On The Hill gets disqualified as a communist abomination.

And stop calling me those Capital "A" names. Just because I spent my whole "adult" life in and out of universities doesn't mean I didn't spend the whole time criticizing establishment ways of doing things — I wanted nothing better than seeing a new way of distributing knowledge succeed.

Hence the irony …


Yep, http://www.garypnunn.com/ …

And a not-so-healthy dose of http://tip.psychology.org/festinge.html, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Festinger/.

Jon

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

The Wikipedia Signpost has now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-05-18/In_the_news to this thread. Does this mean that WR is now a GOODSITE?

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

NYB, when are you going to put your name on your user page? Cool_Hand_Luke should do it too.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

I actually had planned to do it this week, as I mentioned in this thread last week. I might well have done it when I returned to editing last summer, but I didn't particularly appreciate the feeling of being coerced into it.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

It means that WR is in danger of passing from irreverence to irrevelance.

Jon

Posted by: The Joy

We're slowly becoming more like the Village Pump than the Sewage Treatment Plant, aren't we?

I would like to think at least that people who come to this forum will look at Wikipedia more closely and think twice about using it as a reference source.

It is still scary to me to think that a website that is the number one site of the number one search engine can have so much power over knowledge and how people assimilate information.

All I know to do as an aspiring librarian is to teach people how to vet and analyze information. Hopefully, they would realize that Wikipedia fails as a reliable source. Still, I'm only one man and not everyone listens to their librarians or teachers, you know?

Maybe Wikipedia Review can help? I don't know. After all this forum's been through last year and early this year, I'm just not sure anymore. I know I've been part of problem by focusing on the gossip and character antics of Wikipedia and not the deeper things, but I just don't know how to steer in the right direction.

It's all too depressing.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

Maybe the move would be easier if the User pages has a "noindex" just like the User_talk pages do. I think there is more work to be done on the "noindex" front. It's true that your user page would most likely be in the top ten results in a search for your real name, because your real name is unusual and Google is infatuated with everything from Wikipedia.

That's all the more reason to level the field by adopting a "noindex" policy for all User pages. It might even take the wind out of some of those pesky teenage editors if they were unable to get a hormone kick from their Google juice.

Posted by: Somey

It's all your fault! You've ruined everything!

I prefer to see this as one of those "slow news day" types of incidents, personally.

Posted by: Milton Roe

I'm not convinced that small government people elected "Feds will fix your K-12" Bush in 2000. I think it was simply a knee jerk reaction against "Feds will control every aspect of your lives to make Earth better" Gore. And a near thing it was, too. After eight years of Clinton and Wife, it was time to see if maybe the Feds couldn't start minding their own business. And except for the schools and presumably a lot more pork-barrelled baseball stadiums, it might even have worked if bin Laden hadn't attacked us so successfully.

Then came 9/11 and everybody started acting paranoid and you couldn't tell Republicans from Democrats for the longest time, which is how we GOT the term "NEO-Con." After 9/11 even liberal New Yorkers wanted to go somewhere far away and bomb the shit out of somebody. Anybody. This lasted right through 2004. Or at least enough of it did to put Bush in a second time.

Had 9/11 not happened, I think we'd have seen 8 years of harmless muddling and probably less government than we'd have gotten with Gore. Sure the environment would have suffered more than it would have under Gore, but I doubt Gore would have seen the housing/borrowing bubble coming, either. That was a 7 trillion dollar pot of equity just waiting to be invaded, borrowed, and spent living the good-life, by everybody (both Republicans and Democrats-- we're talking everybody whose mortage is underwater right now-- which is a quarter of them). And I think it would have happened, no matter who was at the helm.

And thus, absent 9/11, we'd be right here at the same place, except without the extra trillion or so of debt that we've spent on Iraq. Which would be a help right now, but with 7 trillion of US housing debt, that doesn't mean everything would have been fine. I'll bet 25 cents Gore would have figured out some way to spend a pile of his own social program money, had he been elected.

It's not clear to me that Bush's No Child Left Behind could have possibly spent as much money as our military expenses the first 8 years of this century, as a Gore Democrats-Gone-Wild program (think Obama with training wheels) would have. There's just no way to dump that much money INTO K-12 education in such a short time. They'd have had to have kids riding to magnet schools in solid gold cadillacs.

So, absent 9/11 (and that's a big thing which nobody forsaw in 2000), I think we'd be in marginally better shape right now, with Repuplicans.

Anyway, don't blame any of this present Perfect Economic Storm on libertarians. Conservatives, sure. Liberals, sure. Homeowners and Preditory Banks and idiot economics with these new derivative weapons of mass financial destruction-- sure. Geez, the whole government of Iceland went belly up when fisherman made enough money to buy banks and leverage them at 30:1 fractional reserve. And that's with essentially no defense spending crisis or 9/11, there.

Anyway, libertarians, no way is their thinking especially responsible for this. Do you think the people of Iceland are libertarians? Hell, they're more or less watermellon Green-outside Red-inside eco-socialists. With a good non-pathological highly-educated culture. Gore's wet dream. They got pounded by the global housing bubble, anyway. Just as Gore would have.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

On His Blindness

http://www.sonnets.org/milton.htm

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Indeed. There was a thread on the village pump about this. Someone was wanting to know why the hell their user-page ranked higher on google than WP's article about the bird species they named their account after. I'm guessing it has something to do with the quantity of links pointing to each page?

Noindex of user-pages would make self-promotion (and certain types of cyber-stalking) slightly more difficult. And I do mean slightly.

Still, I'd support this change unless there is some meaningful down-side. Help me out here as I'm not seeing one.

Posted by: Moulton

The Culture of Coercion and Bullying

There, in a nutshell, is the core problem with WikiCulture.

Coercion, bullying, binding, and gagging is simply not a sustainable practice for a functional project in education.

But it's a sustainable practice for a simulated war game.

Posted by: Lar

Strikes me that the default for all namespaces ought to be noindex, and then evaluate namespace by namespace whether to be non default, (so article would be indexed) and then evaluate page by page (where necessary) whether to be non default from the non default (so that the article called "Daniel Brandt is a big weenie" is noindex even though articles generally are...)

I could swear there was a proposal to actually do that at some point.

But specifically, I think user ought to be noindex just like user talk.

Posted by: Cedric

Yet another vapor policy. Just like flagged revisions.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

I thought NYB would realize that his choice is to either put his real name on his user page, or see his real name on hivemind along with his law firm's name. But he continues to equivocate and obfuscate. Therefore, he's back on hivemind.

When he puts his real name on his user page it will come off of hivemind. That's in his interest, because then his law firm's name won't show up in Google by virtue of his association of Wikipedia.

Same for Cool_Hand_Luke — put your real name on your user page and you can come off of hivemind. I believe in equal treatment for all of Jimbo's arbcom lackeys.

Neither NYB nor his law firm will rank as well they could on Google until I initiate further Google-manipulation techniques, which won't happen unless I get pissed off more than I am at the moment. If anyone has a problem with this, please send your complaints to Google!

Posted by: gomi

If it is supposed to be an encyclopedia, what possible argument is there for indexing anything other than article pages? Even then, it would seem that #REDIRECT pages and most fancruft pages should be NOINDEX. Of course, that presumes Wikipedia's real intention is to be an encyclopedia. As we know, nothing could be further from the truth. The Wikipidiots desperately want their drama and ego-centric masturbation to be google-able.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

If your goal is to hold him personally "accountable" why is the name of his employer relevant?

Posted by: the_undertow

1. Brandt does things arbitrarily.
2. He feels morally compelled to inform Brad's clients that their attorney may be spending billable hours editing Wikipedia.

I really can't believe we are back at this again.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yuh, it came from ME, among others (actually I suggested only BLPs be automatically noindexed, but it really should be all BLPs, userspace, and maybe even article TALK space). The rest of the encyclopedia articles deserve to be google-findable.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23031&view=findpost&p=157102

Let's see you find anyone who suggested it sooner.

Milt

(Born to have my ideas ignored, then percolate up through people's unconscienceness' eventally)

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Okay, but... would this concern not also apply to anyone who holds a job? How is Brad special in this regard?

And above all, isn't it somebody else's problem?

Posted by: dtobias

A more succinct way of putting it is "Brandt is a http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick."

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

I don't like Brandt's constantly changing and contingent standards for Hivemind. It would be better if as an a person of authority on WP NYB was simply listed in the same manner as anyone else. But holding Brandt to any standard or measure based on a WP essay is pretty lame.


(Not directed at Dan) Any claims that NYB bills clients for on wiki time is baseless and not supported by any evidence whatsoever. I don't believe that Brandt has ever asserted this.

Posted by: dtobias

Well, obviously I'm not following that essay entirely, since it also says that you shouldn't use it to try to label another person in violation of the No Personal Attacks policy.

Posted by: zvook

I haven't seen him do so either. But people do goof off on company time, which is to me morally acceptable and one of the decent arguments for pseudonymity, assuming said pseudonym isn't fucking up on BLPs (and without prejudice to the argument that to contribute is to fuck up). Not everyone can be self-employed, comfy academics, retirees or otherwise freed from the encumbrances of The Man.

Speaking of which, to go back for a moment to the politics of the blog, I would call it right-wing, since it hosts the kind of libertarians who value the freedom of money to travel but not people, the freedom of corporations but not (the "un-ownability" of) the environment, the freedom to invade other countries, and ergo the freedom to vote for the last president twice, as main man Eugene did. They always seem a funny kind of libertarians to me. And the commentators reflect the readership, present company excluded of course. Eugene is often reasonable enough, though this http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-volokh092702.asp for nationalreviewonline was not his finest hour.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Indeed I think this accusation came primarily from Colscott.

This is suitable for framing:

That's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man mind you, not to be confused with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Man_Is_Mine or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Man.

Posted by: Random832

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thebainer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fred_Bauder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdforrester

Posted by: zvook

Dunno about that!

Posted by: Somey

I was suggesting that they do something like that back in 2006 - http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=5501&view=findpost&p=19053, for example.

Not to take credit or anything...

Posted by: Milton Roe

Ohhhhh, very good! Did you know the actual HTML(?) tag for that, at the time? AFAIK, we didn't discover NOINDEX until some time later. And were astounded at how easy this was, and yet WP still refuses to alter their software to allow it (yes, you can't add {{NOINDEX}} to a mainspace page and have it do anything, even if you want to).

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Well, just thinking out loud here. If you tag a bad article with this, then forget about it, you'll be increasing the likelihood that nobody will ever find it and nothing will be done about it.

There may be a way to prevent it from ever appearing as a "random article" either. I'll have to test this on my site.

Posted by: One

Since the day Hivemind opened, Brandt has been consistently uneven in the treatment of listing. He has habitually offered to remove people for kissing his ring in various ways. I can't imagine why he thinks it helps his cause. I would have voted to delete his articles without coercion (as indeed I did). I think his critique would be stronger without it; either list everyone or define fixed criteria for removal.

I won't cooperate with anything else.


MBisanz is the guru in this subject. He's made several proposals to improve things. http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23060&view=findpost&p=157930

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

And yet you capitulate to coercion, double standards, favoritism, hypocrisy, and inconsistency on a massive scale every day when it comes to Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: One

No, the difference is that I sympathize with Daniel Brandt's position. He would be better off if he stopped offering to add or remove people for favors, so I'm going to do him a favor and ignore it every time he makes me such a proposition.

Brandt: if you think I should list my name, I might have taken the advice. It's a reasonable position. But I'm certainly not going to do it if people believe it's an example of your coercion or my capitulation to your coercion.

Keep me listed. Or don't. But do yourself a favor and stop asking me for Hivemind favors.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

WALOC*

Jon

* What A Load Of Crap

Posted by: Lar

YMMV*

Lar

* Your Mileage May Vary

Posted by: dtobias

IKYABWAI*

Dan

* I Know You Are But What Am I?

Posted by: Somey

To be fair (not that they deserve fairness under the circumstances), it wasn't quite that simple, originally. The searchbots only care about the URL (i.e., they don't know what a "namespace" is), so in theory the Wikipedia folks could have simply moved any questionable BLP or other article into some sort of "quasi-namespace" and added the quasi-namespace to robots.txt.

IOW, they could have moved "Daniel Brandt" to "BLP/Daniel Brandt," added "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLP/*" to robots.txt as an exception, and that article (and others with "BLP/" in front of their titles) would have been de-indexed. However, that would have broken external links to the article, and since redirects are essentially the same as the target article as far as Google is concerned, they would either have had to accept the breakage of those links (no big deal IMO, if used only in specific cases), or needed some means of preventing the Redirect from working specifically for searchbots. WR's board software can do things like that, but MediaWiki either isn't that sophisticated, or nobody wants to develop/enable an extension to make it that sophisticated.

"NOINDEX" tagging is actually harder to implement, but since theoretically it could be added to any article by any editor (if not disabled by the developers, as they've done), it's a better solution (or would be if it were fully enabled).

Anyway, the reason it's harder is that MediaWiki produces and outputs its HTML page headers before it ever reads, much less parses, the article text in the database. That "noindex" has to be in the headers as a META tag, but "pre-parsing" the article text would add to the processing overhead and affect performance... So, I'd assume (I haven't actually looked, to be honest) that parsing for the __NOINDEX__ "magic word" takes place at the point of storing the text - i.e., "post-parsing" - and the presence of the magic word sets a flag in a separate field, which wouldn't have to be parsed.

One of these days I'll take a look at it and see how they actually did that. Regardless though, a really good MediaWiki developer shouldn't have needed more than a couple of days to figure out the technical aspects - a couple of hours, more likely. Certainly not two years, in any event - the fact is, they just didn't want to do it, and wouldn't have if people like Newyorkbrad hadn't gotten behind the idea. Which is why I believe Mr. Brad should be highly commended for taking a stand on it.

Posted by: sbrown

Im sure we all admire Ones firm and principalled stand. The question is this. Daniel if I mistake not has several important wikidiots in fear of his list who run to do his biding when he snaps his fingers. Can he get more power by removing the fear? Of course not. Does he like his power? You tell me. So One is wasting his time telling Daniel to stop. But I say more strength to Daniel. Wikidiots need someone to fear!

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Yes, he has all the firm principals of Sgt. Schultz. But Prisoners Of Wikipedia are not required to play by Col. Klink's rules.

Ja Ja

Posted by: MBisanz

Which is also why I created http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOINDEX as a page to disambiguate the various efforts, but sadly that page has gone unloved.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Not surprisingly. Inasmuch as Google is the motor that drives much of the evil that WP does in the world, just a simple judicious use of NOINDEX, as a sort of clutch which would decouple WP from Google at key places, could go a long way towards carving out the evil and leaving the rest of the heap as its own unique mix of (more or less) harmless garage-sale trash, trivia, junk, and excellence.

Example: you could NOINDEX all BLPs, even dead-tree famous BLPs and non-controversial BLPs. Then, when the subject died, you'd simply remove the tag. How easy is that? Not a total solution, but (like many other things) a step in the right direction.

Bur we can't have that, now, can we? Anything that simple would be fought tooth and nail as something which would make the game too transparent.

Another use: suppose you get tired of Wikipedia acting like WikiNews and getting the wrong perspective on history by breathlessly modifying articles on events as they happen. Okay, you can unplug some of this by simply NOINDEXing articles on in-the-news events (some Middle East uproar) for a couple of months.

The same for articles on political elections. NOINDEX them until the day after the election is over, and you remove all the political spin-doctor motivation and return them to encyclopedia-land, where they belong. Nothing in Wikipedia about Sarah Palin shows up until Nov. 5, 2008. Think of the work saved, due to the motivation being unplugged.

So you could still write about anything that goes on in the Bush or Obama administration, but Google doesn't pick it up till the administration is done, and the NOINDEX tags are removed. If you see an edit war starting to brew over some nationistic bit of nonsense which is ongoing, NOINDEX it until it dies down. Do that ON TOP of all the other usual measures.

Yeah, I know-- you'd have to change that paragraph in the WP front page, crowing about itself as a news source. And you might have to take Wikinews seriously. But do you want a semi-encyclopedia, or not?