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Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Resolved —

The Use Of Pseudonyms Is A Prima Facie Symptom Of Emotional, Mental, And Moral Dysfunction

'Nuff Said

Jon

Notice. Pseudonymaniacs Anonymous Meets Here Wednesday Mornings, 3:00 AM.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

what, anywhere? Or just on wikipedia-related sites?

Using a pseudonym is only what most people do on the entire internet, at least for some of the time.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I think you have the Internet confused with Usenut.

Jon

Posted by: Moulton

Is the initiation of this thread prima facie evidence that the author has now eschewed the practice, going forward, of registering pseudonymous accounts on Wikipedia?

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

Hogwash.

"If everyone knew what others said of them, no one would be friends" (Hugh Prather)

That goes double for political opinions, and general banter.

Enforced real identity-internet identification, in the current US legal environment which is completely unconcerned with privacy, not to mention libel or defamation, is just plain f-king stupid, as a suggestion. (Really, it's dumb anywhere, but especially under US law).

I don't know how you guys can see it as otherwise. (Though most people on WR seem to do).

The operant assumption that real identification of, for example, Wikipedia Administrators would cause a sea change in the abuse quotient is not only theoretically flawed, but empirically proven to be incorrect. Durova, Jimbo, Guy Chapman, David Gerard, Gwernol. They (and many others on Wikipedia) are all heavy handed persons whos identities are known, and they don't give a crap. The issue is POWER, and a LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY (legal or otherwise) to prevent abuse.

In the meantime, claiming that true-identity identification is going to solve things is a bunch of hooey, sorry, Jon. I've never failed to be confused by your continued harboring of this belief, but I suppose it will always be one thing upon which we agree to disagree.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

It's not even so much about libel, as just common sense and security on the internet, as well as just plain reality. Children are encouraged not to reveal their real name for their safety, and most adults choose to due to it being just common sense as you don't know the level of sanity or know the disposition of people you are talking to, and due to talking to far more people and a larger range of people online, there's more risk.

A lot of people who use their real name online, are newcomers to the internet. Look at the presumed grief such as his banning from wikipedia being googlable under his real name, because Jon used his real name as his username. If he'd used a pseudonym in the first place that's far less likely to have happened.

"If you are an adult who is new to the Internet:

* While the tips for students below are geared toward teens and children, adults need to stay safe online, too, and can use these basic guidelines to do so."

" * What you look like—your appearance, gender, age
* Where you might be—address, school, workplace, hangouts, clubs
* Who you are—your real name, not even your first name, teams you play on, bank account info
* And NEVER share a pic of yourself—avoid posting your pic openly or emailing it to those you don't know well offline already"

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:bjvK25Zr990J:craig.senate.gov/i_internetsec.cfm+internet+security+real+name&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=uk

This was written by a US senator.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

Think how many people on the average site, any site, are using their real name as their usename. It's hardly just on usenet that this is by far the minority of users of any given site.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

That's the trick with Wikipedia. Wikipedia looks to be a reliable source of information, presumably run in a professional manner. Any normal expert, contributor to a journal, would be inclined to give out their name, as it is tied to their credentials, which would presumably justify their basis for making certain edits (hey, didn't Essjay receive certain leverage with his two Phds? I rest my case).

So it isn't only an issue of net-naiivite. It's an issue of the basis presumption that Wikipedia is a safe, well-run environment. Which is certainly is not.

Posted by: Gold heart

Agree, Wikipedia is a very highly abusive environment, and not very conducive to expert editing. Many expert editors have been very badly abused, and have given up, and we can see POV-pushing in certain areas, like Israel-Palestine, British-Irish articles to name but a few. The present structure of anarchy will not last, all such models always fail in the end. Something better will come along and replace it, sooner rather than later.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

I suppose you're right about that in that some people might believe the hype and not think of it as being run just like any other website/ forum and with the same risks. Although most consider the possibility, as evidenced by the fact that most people there use a screen name when they join, as they do on any other site.

Posted by: Amarkov

That's perfectly fine, if Wikipedia is just another social network. But it is advertised as an encyclopedia. And a good encyclopedia cannot be written if there is reason to fear identification.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

It's still the internet, and internet risks apply. It's a wiki, that anyone can edit. I.e., you could meet any old dodgy nutter such as Amorrow. If you used your real name would you feel 100% comfortable with him knowing it, especially if you were female? Or if you were "david shankbone" and used your real name, with the threats of violence that he has received, I think you would feel more intimidated and be more at risk, as the person would have more chance of finding out where you live.

Posted by: Amarkov

That's the problem. It is generally a bad idea to identify yourself on Wikipedia, I agree. But because of this (in addition to other reasons), Wikipedia never can be a truly good encyclopedia, and it should stop pretending to be such.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

I'm generally *not* in favor of internet identity-openness, given my experience, and things I've observed in the past 10 years.

Having said that, I disagree with your arguments about identity for publishing personsl. What about the reporters in the Post, or the Times? Couldn't they also be subjects of targeting by weirdos? Sure. Actually anyone with their name in the paper has the same problem. So I disagree with that premise.

Why did D Shankbone get a death threat? Do they know who did it, and what their beef was against him?

Given that wikipedia is an amateur-run venture, and more of a chat board than a professional system, anonymity is acceptable. What's not acceptable is that the behavioral limits are absent, and the governing is collusive, and corrupt and there's no feedback loop for issues whatsoever. So something is out of kilter. I don't have a proposed solution for it, personally.


I agree with that there there shouldn't be a reason to fear identification due to abuse. And I agree that a normal publication normally implies identification. Wikipedia is not normal.

Wikipedia has a way of bringing out the worst in normal, reasonable people, once they have pushed them beyond all reason.

Hype? Its got credibility. Most people have no clue that its a giant chat board. You do, but you hang out on the net. Most people don't.

and Most wikipedians are kids, or tech-intensive people, so they do this as a rule, from chat-board experience. The experts join wikipedia expecting it to be the real deal, and many of them aren't chat board savvy. Thats why many of them get nailed.

Posted by: Proabivouac

I strongly agree with this.

Were Wikipedia run as a responsible and respectable scholarly project, not only would there be no reason to be pseudonymous, contributors would want to take credit for participating there. Despite all the problems, some still want credit for their labor - several real-name users come to mind. If allowing pseudonymity empowers conflict-of-interest editing, so does compelling pseudonymity, as Wikipedia does with its flame-war environment, remove a motivation for expert involvement, as does the increasingly poor reputation of the project as a whole.


This is a very unusual case, which is why he is often invoked as the only example. Amorrow cannot be blamed for Wikipedia pseudonymity in general.

In times past, I've been involved in some pretty heated arguments in contentious areas of the project. Though I'm easy to locate, not once did I receive any real-world threats, phone calls, etc. What did happen to me was that I was attacked on Wikipedia - in fact, I'm still being attacked from Wikipedia.

Many of us, I'm certain, can relate to that.

That's not "the internet" with "internet risks", that's Wikipedia, and it's something Wikipedia can stop. What's missing is acknowledgement of the problem, appreciation of its seriousness, and willingness to change.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

Did I say anything about that? You mean in newspapers, or on wiki? I only really meant on a website such as wiki.



That is one of the main points as far as I can see- the system is not so bad, but how the clique runs it and enforces it is wrong.



It's not a ''publication''- not as in a newspaper etc. Maybe slightly more so now it is said to be coming out in book form in Germany, but even so. You can bet the published version will be a sanitized version



Most people hang out on the net to an extent nowadays, especially younger people. People don't even have to be netheads to have heard a bit about what wikipedia's like. A friend of my mother's had read about the Rachel Marsden article doctoring or some other Jimbo and wikipedia corruption scandal, even on the BBC website.



That goes back to the 'new to the internet' point. They would have similar (though perhaps not half as intense) newcomer's problems to other sites. Life is depressing like that- harsh realities are usually learned by painful or frustrating experience. Especially on Wikipedia

Actually I know someone who's an economics expert in his 50s, and he tried to contribute to wiki, but he just kept replacing an article or parts of it with a long explanation of his own. He couldn't interact with other editors. It comes across as an autistic lack of social skills or a superiority complex to others. But maybe it was being new to the workings of a wiki. My mother's friend didn't know what a smilie : ) meant and so she would get in more rows with people as she didn't realise when they were not meaning to be as abrasive as it otherwise looked.

This is probably one of the reasons why there's less older contributors to wiki.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

I think that you vastly underestimate the level of attention that people who have nothing to do with Wikipedia (or the net in general) to things that you do. The reason Wikipedia has been able to function as it does, is that most people don't realize its operational modalities.
Not everyone, and not everywhere, sorry.

In bits and pieces. Sure. But its not anywhere near where it could be

That and most people dont like to work for free.

Posted by: wikiwhistle

I've not said anything about the level of attention I think it is paid. I think sometimes people on this site "vastly overestimate" the level to which if they knew about the clique etc, people outside wiki would care to the extent of intervening, or whether they would even be able to do so. It will take a lawsuit. Because otherwise, no-one cares enough to act. At the most, they laugh or mock at the degeneracy of Jimbo, and tut at the corruption. Just because it doesn't effect them personally- which is what it takes for most people to do something, unfortunately. It's difficult I know, but we can only do our bit as much as we are inclined, and other than that seek the serenity to accept the things we are not entirely able change

Not everyone, and not everywhere, sorry.

Posted by: Disillusioned Lackey

Not really. No one vastly overestimates much here. The people on this site are pragmatic. But they understand that most people who have not used Wikipedia don't know how weird it all is. And people who have an inkling that it is weird, or dangerous, don't understand why, and usually dont have the motivation to learn about it.

Chicken and egg. That lawsuit you are talking about has built in preventative protection. Someone needs to care to change the laws, so there can be a lawsuit. (repeat recursion).
This isn't alcoholism. It's Wikipedia. Anything can be changed. It only depends how much energy you want to invest in it. Unfortunately this is not a high profit career (exposing Wikipedia).

No, most people don't know what Wikipedia is like. Even lawyers who deal with internet content matters don't know yet. There has been 4-5 newspapers stories and so what. Wikipedia got a few million dollars the next week. Think those donors knew the full story? Think they surf the net? Nope. Nope. They probably think such stories are banter. And I dont know what Radio 5 is, just to make a point.
Yes. So is housecleaning.

Yes, we are all aware of that.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Sorry, Charle — maybe that's not your real name, but why should you care? — I've heard all the arguments, not a one of them worth the à priori it is written on, and I might have bought them four years ago, but what I say at the top of the thread sums up the empirical observations that I've made in the mean time.


Jon

Posted by: Moulton

This thread is an example of Regression Toward the Meme.

Posted by: jd turk

Disagree completely. In the case of WP, its very structure and encouragement of anonymous IP editors makes pseudonyms necessary.

I've edited on there for about a year, mostly just minor edits and the like. It's not like I edit war at the Gaza Strip article or anything else that's a hotbed of emotional conflict. That's just not what I'm interested in.

I'd love to be able to edit under my real name, but about six months ago some punk college student got ticked off that I removed his name from a college article. He found my websites and spammed them, threatened my ebay account, and caused trouble for me at work with anonymous emails. My old username was connected to my email account, so a few pages of googling me was sufficient to find me out.

I'm a semi-public figure. If everybody else is afforded the luxury of being anonymous, I need the same for the purpose of safety. Even if ninety-nine percent of people on the internet are normal, that one percent can cause a lot of trouble with very little cause or effort.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I'm just telling one of the few things that I have learned from Wikipedia over the last four years.

Just by way of clarifying the terms of the statement, the qualification "prima facie" is there to stipulate what computer geeks call a "default assumption". There can be exceptions on account of extenuating circumstances. But the essence of exceptions and extenuating circumstances is to be few in number and even accidental. But the rule remains valid — if a non-trivial subpopulation starts claiming exemptions from the ordinary norms of scholarship and society — as they do in Wikipedia — then there will be Emotional, Mental, And Moral Dysfunction (EMAMD) abroad in the Land, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

Jon

Posted by: wikiwhistle

If most of the Western population starts claiming exemptions from the ordinary norms of scholarship and society — as they do at times on the internet — then there will be Emotional, Mental, And Moral Dysfunction (EMAMD) abroad on said internets, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Citizen Turk,

Let me focus for a moment on your opening statement:

Do you see what you just said there? You said that Anonyms make Pseudonyms necessary.

Now there may be a distinction between Anonyms and Pseudonyms in Normal Society, and many Wikipediots like to pretend that the putative distinction makes a Big Diff in Wikipedia, but if you really think about the matter, or if you are unlucky enough to spend a lot of time experiencing the practical consequences of the Wikipediot usage of these terms, you will find that it's a distinction without a difference. In short, that which we call Anon IP is simply a species of e-specially noxious Pseudonym.

In light of that Principle Of Equivalence, your statement simply says that Pseudonyms make Pseudonyms necessary.

In terms of practical effects, your statement says that Deficits Of Accountability (DOA's) make Deficits Of Accountability (DOA's) necessary.

And that argument is, well, DOA.

Jon

Posted by: anthony

Maybe, but contributing to Wikipedia in the first place isn't necessary.

It's certainly arguable that any of us who continue to contribute to Wikipedia, even after knowing what goes on there, are emotionally, mentally, and morally, dysfunctional. I don't really agree with this, looking back through my edits over the last month, I think they were mostly rational (they were mostly about subjects I was trying to learn more about, with the rest being responses to things that showed up on my talk page). Then again, my username there, as well as here, is my first name. Is that a pseudonym?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Just one question — Hopkins or Perkins?

Jon

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Yes, I think that should be considered a pseudonym. It does not link your account to your IRL in any meaningful way. Also there is no real assurance that it is actually your first name. But on the hand it at least is less annoying than many pseudonym username.

Also another effect of pseudonyms, which I have noted with some displeasure in my own contributions, including here at WR, is that not using a IRL identity permits a user to engage in harsher criticism than might be otherwise used. By using your real first name maybe you not as likely to do this. But still it is a pseudonym.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Pseudonym = False Name

For example, consider the agent or agents who edited Wikipedia under the following names:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:217.237.149.143
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:L%21-wgi

Let us assume that the agent or agents in question are human beings and not robots.

In that case, it being highly unlikely that the true names of any human beings are either "217.237.149.143" or "L!-wgi", we may provisionally assume that both of these names are false names of the agent or agents in question.

Jon

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

I think the other prong of pseudonym, distinguishing it from an anon, is that it comes with it's very own "reputational bank account." Which of course can be walked away from if over-drawn.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Yes, of course, being closer to Normal than most of us — though I did live in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal%2C_Illinois for a brief time in the 80's, it has been a long time since I've been back to Normal — you are thinking of the way it is in Normal Society.

But Wikipedia is a long way from Normal, and you can look it up.

No one is really Anon, since everyone edits under some User Name, even if it's a Number, even if it shifts from time to time, and even if it's shared by many other agents from time to time.

I know of several agents who operate under a small number of IP Numbers, laying up credits and debits under their various and sundry Numb-Nyms, kind of like Numbered Swiss Bank Accounts, I guess.

But all of these are still False Names, unless they are really people's legal names.

Jon

Posted by: anthony

Ironically, my contributions nowadays are not nearly as dysfunctional as my contributions were when my username *was* my full real name. And I actually engage in much *less* harsh criticism now than I did back then. Then again, maybe this isn't ironic. Maybe the premise that pseudonyms are a symptom of dysfunction is a false one.

But then, I don't think every public statement one ever makes should be recorded for eternity and indexed. I don't like that about Wikipedia, and I don't like that about Citizendium either. Is there any real purpose to maintaining the full edit history of an article from years ago? Does that justify the incredible privacy violations made possible by this edit history? What about the talk pages? Can't these at least be discarded after a while? I like the idea from the old days of refactoring talk pages, but nowadays that's pretty much treated as a privacy violation.

I dunno, I don't contribute much to either Wikipedia or Citizendium any more (never did contribute much to Citizendium). I ran across an interesting quote from Larry Sanger today, which summarizes exactly how I feel about Citizendium:



Sanger wrote that March 1, 2002. Who wants to put their real name on an unfinished work-in-progress about some topic that you barely know anything about? If I'm going to spend a lot of time creating "something of importance", I'll publish it on my own site, not on a wiki.

Is it a symptom of dysfunction for me to press "add reply" right now? After all, I'm using a pseudonym, right? No, I don't think this is dysfunctional. I'm using this forum as a conversation, and I think there's a good chance someone will reply with something insightful. And like my contributions to Wikipedia, I don't want this conversation recorded for eternity and indexed (and attached to my real name), if for no other reason than that I won't care 5 years from now how I felt at this particular moment. I'll have worked this particular quandary out by then.

Posted by: jd turk

Pretty much, yeah. I'm saying if there is any lack of accountability in the system, it's unsafe. If there was a reliable method of identification for all users on WP (or any other colaborative site), then pseudonyms would not be necessary.

However, there isn't, and they are.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

That is a good example of an ill-designed system. WikiMedia software is just some general purpose stuff that can be used for stuff. Wikipedia then maps important stuff onto mechanisms designed for other stuff. Then the mechanism doesn't quite do the right thing - like how can you really determine an article's attribution?

The record is important for attribution, but the gunk that goes with it, the detritus of the edit explanation is not important. Similarly the tradition of keeping the unfortunate records of article discussion keeps crap hanging around.

There are those who will argue that keeping the old tat around in an archive stops rehashing old discussions, but I suspect the downsides of ownership and abuse are worse.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

At least we have come to the understanding that the issue of Authorship By Any Name (ABAN) is just some color of Herring for the more general issue of Personal Accountability And Responsibility (PAAR).

If you are from the US, or have heard very much about the place, you will almost immediately recognize the form of argument that we are discussing here. In one of its most frequent applications it goes a bit like this:

AK-47s On The Street Make AK-47s For Home Defense Necessary.

And we all know how "safe" that has made us.

Jon

Posted by: Proabivouac

That's right.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

But at least this returns us to the topic.

And at last this returns us to the point.

Jon

Posted by: Moulton

Embrace Your Avatar

Gordon Pitts of the Toronto Globe and Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080602.wratthetop02/BNStory/ Gerri Sinclair on the role of avatars in online cultures.

Click on the http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080602.wratthetop02/BNStory/ to read Gordon Pitts' interview with Gerri Sinclair.

Posted by: the fieryangel

Let's not even go there...

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Buddha Bump!

Jon

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

On top of everything else, the use of pseudonyms quickly issues in the circumstance that the pseuds in question have nothing else to talk about but pseudonyms.

Jon

Posted by: Somey

I actually see this as a sort of "sub-phase" in the Wikipedia life cycle, one that impacts this website as well as other sites that are related to WP in some way, or that include significant portions of the WP community. Another term for it might be "Phase transition factor."

Essentially, I've always posited that the Maintenance Phase (which we're in now) would eventually give way to the "Lockdown Phase," and that this would occur over the course of roughly 5 years (we're now getting towards the end of Year 2). But the mechanism by which this will occur is interesting in itself. My assumption is that three main issues will drive the transition: Editor-gang politics, the leadership vacuum, and the destabilizing effects of anonymity.

It may be that the anonymity problem is the thing they try to deal with first, except that it's a veritable certainty that they won't "solve" it in the sense of making it either go away, or figuring out some magical means of ensuring that the system isn't abused by sock puppeteers, meat puppeteers, or members of the Boston Meat Sox. The only way to even allow for it is some degree of lockdown applied to the actual content - i.e., what I'm assuming will happen.

If they were like, super-smart, they'd deal with the leadership vacuum first, because that's at least theoretically solvable (even if, from a practical perspective, it isn't any more solvable than the rest of their problems). If they had effective leadership, they'd at least have something to help them deal with the other issues - otherwise, they might as well just go ahead and make the whole database read-only now, if only to save time.

Posted by: Moulton

I see it going the other way.

I see WMF-sponsored projects ineluctably morphing into an array of post-modern pre-apocalyptic http://underground.musenet.org:8080/utnebury/banshee.html, ranging from Pee-Wee's Play House to Mad Max Thunderdome.

Posted by: Somey

Forgive me if my translation from Moulton-speak is a little rusty, but I'm guessing that you don't think they'll move toward a Lockdown Phase at all, but simply allow the site(s) to qualitatively devolve and deteriorate into an increasingly useless and unreliable state, operated by what will amount to little more than interweb drama factories?

That may be true within certain "trouble spot" content areas, but as long as there's any money behind WP at all, I can't imagine they'd just let it all go to seed like that. Also, remember that after the Lockdown Phase comes the Attrition/Dispersion Phase, which may be more to your liking, endgame-wise.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Year 2? — I thought it was 7 or 8. Are you talking about WP or WR — or maybe there's no difference anymore?

At any rate, all I've learned from my last 4 years — observing, participating, observing again — is that you can't trust pseuds for anything.

It's that proton pseudon all over again.

Jon

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

After all this time, you continue to labor under the illusion that their principal business is building an encyclopedia?

Jon

Posted by: Moulton

I don't think they can arrest the transformation, Somey.

I think the conversion of the Wikisiphere into a http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Moulton#Drama_Engines is an unstoppable juggernaut.

Last night on IRC, I opened a PM window with John Vandenberg (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Jayvdb). I asked him if he cared to weigh in on some ethical issues that are no longer being addressed within the now-defunct Ethics Project. He said he did not see any ethical problems in the actions of Jimbo Wales or the Wikiversity Bureaucrats.

I asked him if he saw an absence of a community peer review of the practice of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Attainder as problematic. He reiterated that he saw no ethical problems and declined to say more.

I then raised the issue that WMF-sponsored projects seemed to be evolving into http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Moulton#Drama_Engines. Jay suggested that I publish that thesis as a peer reviewed journal article. I asked him if he or others in Wikiversity might have an interest in doing an internal peer review of that hypothesis first. He expressed some reservations about his readiness to do that, so I sharpened the problem up for him, explaining it as follows

You have two simple hypotheses:

H0 (Null Hypothesis) Wikiversity is an authentic learning community that abides by the protocols of http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Scholarly_ethics.

Against H0 you have:

H1 (Alternate Hypothesis) Wikiversity has been co-opted into a post-modern pre-apocalyptic http://underground.musenet.org:8080/utnebury/banshee.html, much like many other Internet communities of the 1990s.

My concern was that Jay was reifying H1 even as we spoke. It occurred to me that Jay was playing the role of Hear No Evil / See No Evil / Speak No Evil, whilst all this monkey business was going on. And so I invited him to falsify H1. Jay declined in no uncertain terms to engage in an exercise to falsify H1 unless the exercise were approved by a University ethics review board. I asked him if he would participate in falsifying H1 if http://web.mit.edu/committees/couhes/ approved a study.

Jay reviewed that and said he would be happy to participate if the study met the conditions of informed consent at http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/45cfr46.htm#46.116.

I then pointed out that http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Cormaggio is writing his Ph.D. Thesis on Wikiversity at the University of Manchester, and (as far as I knew) he did not ask anyone's consent. I asked Jay if he felt that everyone at Wikiversity, including JWSchmidt, WAS 4.250, and myself were afforded a comparable consent opportunity in Cormaggio's studies which are leading up to his Ph.D. In particular, I was thinking of the experiment in which JWSchmidt was bound, gagged, kicked, and locked up in the janitoral hall closet for a week. Did Jimbo obtain my consent before subjecting me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Attainder and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immurement#In_literature? Hardly.

Jay assured me he would talk to Cormaggio about that, not having considered beforehand that others might be viewed as participants in http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Moulton/Archive#Scholarly_Peer_Review_of_Managerial_Practices_Demonstrated_in_the_singular_contributions_of_Jimbo_Wales involving JWSchmidt, myself, and the many other community members who were drawn into the drama. Jay opined that it would depend greatly on the details of Cormaggio's research objectives. (See http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=20705 for a link to a just-published peer-reviewed journal article about Wikiversity in which Cormaggio participated.)

I asked Jay if I could quote him on these issues. He declined to go on the record except for one authorized quote: "I can't promise to give my consent to participate in any proposed exercise until I have been appropriately informed, but if your experiment is approved by your human ethics review board, I will give it fair consideration."

So for now, I don't have anyone at Wikiversity who has consented to participate in an exercise to falsify H1 (namely that Wikiversity — much like many other Internet communities of the 1990s — has been co-opted and transformed into a post-modern pre-apocalyptic http://underground.musenet.org:8080/utnebury/banshee.html.

I told Jay that I was chagrined, discouraged, dispirited, and disappointed by his level of caution and formality, but that I accepted his desire not to participate in an exercise to falsify H1 at this time, pending approval of the exercise by http://web.mit.edu/committees/couhes/. My concern is that the conversion of Wikiversity into a post-modern theater of the absurd will be an obvious fait accompli before I can organize and conduct a structured and pre-approved exercise to falsify the thesis that such an irreversible conversion is underway.


There was more to the IRC chat that I didn't include in the above, because it was on another topic. Jay mentioned WikiSource and offered to help me transcribe and upload any peer-reviewed writings that I cared to release to the public-domain.

I asked him if I could I put any of my literary character pages in the public domain, once those characters had completed their own educational journeys. Jay replied that Wikisource only accepts published material. So I asked him how "published" is defined in the Internet Age, since there are a lot of electronic publications nowadays that never use dead trees.

Jay referred me to the Wikisource policy pages, specifically http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:WWI:


So I asked Jay, "Does Peer Review in Wikiversity count as Peer Review? Clearly there are editorial controls, as portions of my writings were edited out of existence."

Jay replied, "No way. If there is any doubt about whether it would be considered self-published, we err on the side of rejecting the text."

"Isn't that a bit disrespectful of the scholarly demeanor of the scholars in Wikiversity?" I replied.

"Not at all," he responded, "it isn't a statement about the scholars; it is a statement about the venue. Wikiversity is not a recognised peer reviewed journal."

And I agree with Jay. The evidence to date is overwhelming that Wikiversity does not even attempt peer review, let alone complete one in the manner I would have naively anticipated from an authentic learning communtiy.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I think both Moulton and Kabalversity have Peer Review confused with Peek Aboo.

Jon

Posted by: Cedric

Strange for me to say, but I find myself more in agreement with Moulton than Somey here. I would not say, however, that much of a transformation is going on, unless by "transformation" one means continuing degeneration. I do very much agree that Wikipedia is an "unstoppable juggernaut": a juggernaut heading slowly but surely down a path that leads to the edge of a cliff.

Posted by: Somey

Year 2 of this particular phase. WP'ers will tell you that Wikipedia isn't "finished" and never really will be, and I suppose that's true to some extent, but late 2005 was the beginning of the final massive growth spurt, during which nearly all the non-esoteric subjects were "taken." After that, it became increasingly difficult, even for specialists, to find things to write new articles about, other than topics related to current events. (Such as new episodes of Doctor Who, and so on.)


Of course not - I've never labored under that illusion. Nevertheless, there are still some useful, if not accurate, articles on Wikipedia, and people are still writing and maintaining them, though at this point they're mostly maintaining. As you've said yourself, you have to allow for some legitimacy in the game, or you won't lure in enough marks to keep it going. What's more, if you drop the pretense of legitimacy, the existing marks will tip, and you'll have to hoof it out of there.

Posted by: Somey

I guess what I'm saying, admittedly in a roundabout way, is that the degeneration is part and parcel of the general failure of the maintenance effort, and that this failure will be used as the pretext for the eventual lockdown. And mind you, I'm not saying that the lockdown will be a bad thing - just the opposite, in fact, though obviously any existing abuse patterns will be locked in along with the content.

In the meantime, there are a series of endemic problems, including the abuse of anonymity, that will be internally viewed as contributing to the continuing degeneration. We're seeing that already, but in all probability, a far greater cause of degeneration will just be common, ordinary user burnout, boredom, frustration, and attrition, but I'm 99-percent sure that will never even occur to them.

Anyhoo, if it does turn out that the deterioration of content and community standards continues unabated for many years longer than I've predicted, and that there's no meaningful move towards lockdown during those years, then it doesn't necessarily mean the life-cycle model is wrong - it might only mean they've stalled in the midst of that one phase. It's certainly possible that the Maintenance Phase could be terminal - let's say that Google decides to significantly alter its PageRank algorithm in favor of the rest of the internet, for example. Something like that might do it... but then again, it might not.

Hard to say!

Posted by: everyking

In the subject areas I work on, there are so many new articles to write, it's staggering. You could give me a team, and I could assign each member of the team several new articles to write each day (including expanding substubs, since that's essentially writing a new article) related to politics in developing countries, and I'm confident we could keep going for a long, long time, even without factoring in anything new from the world post-2008.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

<Insert standard lecture on Content-Blindness — analogous to Snow-Blindness — a condition in which folks who don't know better, and even many who should, just can't seem to see the Mutant Morphing Of The Medium for the Massive Messing About With Messages>

Jon

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Just in case there are few Noobees who do not know what the Principal Bizz of Wikipedia Izz —

The principal business of Wikipedia is the construction of an Internet Golem that is capable of gobbling up all the Topic Turf that it can get its grubby cheeks around and controlling the direction of link-flow through that dominion.

As with any good Scraper, the quality of the content that it uses to occupy its topic turf is wholly irrelevant, so long as it maintains a highly trafficked corner of the web. Having users constantly fighting over its topic turfs is probably an easier way to achieve high traffic than it would be to maintain real-world informative but relatively stable content.

Jon

Posted by: Moulton

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Moulton#Jimbo.27s_Unintended_Drama_Engine

The Medium is the Message.

Content Managers (http://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljmitchell) are SOL.

Survival of the site requires http://www.google.com/search?q=Mimetic+Enthrallment, which is precisely what fuels the http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Moulton#Drama_Engines.

Posted by: Somey

Pursuant to what Jon just posted above, I sort of misstated that thing I said above. The problem in terms of growth vs. maintenance has nothing to do with the problem of finding individual article titles to write, it's all about topic-area territorialism. The WP:OWN rules are never going to be enough to even put a serious dent in that, particularly if you see it as a perceptual problem more than an actual one.

What's more, stubs don't really count, because the newly-arrived mark might just as easily assume that someone else has created the stub specifically to mark out their territory, which presumably will then be defended. That's why each stub has a template on it saying "you can help Wikipedia by expanding it," but that's not enough either. People want virgin territory, topic areas that haven't been despoiled by others having gotten there first to plant the flag. And there's precious little virgin territory left on WP, if any, other than a given current event that just happened. Even there, you end up with "land rush" scenarios where people vie to be the one who writes the first article about a newly-occurring event or object.

Anyway, this is getting a bit off-topic, and I wouldn't blame Jon for wanting to split the thread. However, it might be more relevant if we take the idea a bit further, and ask if a new mark entering the game is more or less likely to dive in when he/she is using his/her real name, and the people already in control of that topic area/territory are not. I'd say less likely, but I'm something of a cynic when it comes to stuff like that.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Moulton,

Put down the mouse, step away from the keyboard, and go see 5 or 6 first-rate plays by professional acting companies — I realize this may be a bit of a challenge in a culturally impoverished backwater like Boston, so you may have to go on the road. When I say Drama, that's what I'm talking about. When you say Drama, you don't know what yer talking about.

Did you see A Disappearing Number? I'm pretty sure Boston was on its itinerary. Highly Recommended.

Jon

Again with the Snow-Blindness. Only Da Rubes Care About Da Con-Tent. Jimbo Crack Corn No Matter What. And WMF Don't Care Either Way.

Now I know that you've written and tested software before, so you really ought to recognize the Phase that you're looking at. It's the Testing On Random Data (TORD) Phase.

Jon

Posted by: Somey

Okay, so who's brushing away the blue-tail fly in this scenario?

And you wonder why this isn't a more popular subforum!


I never have to do testing - everything *I* do is perfect on first run.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I wasn't really in it for the Popularity, but if you are, I can tell you http://wikipedia.org/.

Jon

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Epigraph Added In Proof —

Posted by: Somey

That depends on what you mean by "popularity." I'm not suggesting we try to turn WR into the WP-criticism version of McDonald's, or (Heaven forbid) Wal-Mart, I'm just trying to hint at the fact that the marks and rubes are the people we're trying to help, and while we can do that by pointing out how they've been duped, conned, abused, and exploited, we probably don't do that by telling them they just don't matter.

No offense intended, of course...!

I'm more interested in the life cycle of the website than the corporate entity or entities that operate it, just in case you were wondering. I'm well aware that the current corporate entity benefits enormously from maintaining user anonymity, at least up to the point where they actually have to care about protecting it for any given individual.

Posted by: Count DeMonet

Great image although I'd question its veracity. I think there may be a cliff somewhere off in the distance, but it might never be reached, as the juggernaut is currently careening wildly through a large conurbation, leaving the twisted corpses of pedestrians in is wake (thanks to it's cab full of drunken monkeys all randomly pulling the steering wheel too & fro*). Meanwhile the wiki-cops sit parked up in a different part of town, munching on donuts and arguing over the definition of 'spike-strips'.

* though each of 'em has a foot pressing down firmly on the gas pedal.

Posted by: Meringue

And of course, if they are aware of the cliff, they hope that the rail at the edge is strong enough to stop them.

Posted by: Cedric

Frankly, I don't think even the combination of stop sticks, speed bumps and a rail would be enough. These are wikipediots we're speaking of here, after all.