Sandifer Strolls into the Sunset Options

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Phil_Sandifer
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=158393054

Hmm, he was running for Arbcom too, what a shame.

Keeping this handy, as I expect the Usual Suspects will blank the WP page as soon as they think nobody is looking...

Phil Sandifer's Farewell Address:

There is not presently an effective way to work on this project. Too many people with too many senses of what it means to "write an encyclopedia" collide, and while the article space has means to regulate these differences (NPOV, V, etc) there is no effective means of ordering the creation of policy, and as a result no effective way, in the end, of continuing to order the article space. The failure, nearly two years after the Seigenthaler disaster, to come up with any effective way of writing articles on living people is emblematic of this. So is the continued failure to come up with useful standards for fiction articles that elevate them beyond fannish wankery, or the continued failure to figure out how to deal with the fact that Wikipedia is big enough to have real world consequences for things.

In short, there is no way left to think programmatically about how to improve the project. We are left hoping that Jimbo's increasingly distracted attention will provide a major push for something - as was needed to even fix the basic problems of BLPs. That's not a sustainable model, and given that my interests in Wikipedia have long been as much (if not more) in its meta and policy levels than in its individual articles, the lack of any sustainable model to make progress there leaves me feeling very much out in the cold.

I do not take this as a failure of the wiki model for writing articles. But I cannot find any persuasive evidence that the wiki/consensus model functions on this scale for organizing the project. Instead, article number grows dramatically without a corresponding increase in quality, the methods of improving articles clog up with process, mindless and automated thinking leads to articles getting dismantled in the name of improvement, and it is impossible to usefully have discussions about how to prevent any of this because people are utterly hung up on models of research that do not have any resemblance to anything that actually leads to writing good articles.

In the end, despite a fearsome number of edits in the Wikipedia namespace, I am hard pressed to identify anything substantive I have accomplished in that realm since 2005 when I wrote [[WP:DICK]]. And since I've never been a prolific article writer (less so since excessively arduous sourcing requirements got put into place) I can't really point to accomplishments elsewhere.

The project may not have failed, but I seem to have.

What a crock. He pulled the same crap every other wikijunkie did when they quit:

So I'm gone. I've changed my password to a random string, and I don't anticipate returning at this juncture.

Oh, you don't anticipate coming back? Way to leave yourself an out. Do none of these addicts have the sack to actually quit?

JzG said the same thing. You'll be back. You like the power, however minuscule it is. You need the rest of your wikicrack-smoking friends to pat you on the back and nod when you whine about the good old days of Wikipedia being long gone.

More and more people are recognizing that Wikipedia's internal architecture is irremediably dysfunctional.

What a crock. He pulled the same crap every other wikijunkie did when they quit:

So I'm gone. I've changed my password to a random string, and I don't anticipate returning at this juncture.

Oh, you don't anticipate coming back? Way to leave yourself an out. Do none of these addicts have the sack to actually quit?

JzG said the same thing. You'll be back. You like the power, however minuscule it is. You need the rest of your wikicrack-smoking friends to pat you on the back and nod when you whine about the good old days of Wikipedia being long gone.

Vassyana just left, too, but didn't make a big speech.

Please remove my sysop bit. -- Vassyana (talk) 21:00, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

One of his last edits was to Phil's talk page, asking him to look at his essay The rules are principles.

Vassyana just left, too, but didn't make a big speech.

Please remove my sysop bit. -- Vassyana (talk) 21:00, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

One of his last edits was to Phil's talk page, asking him to look at his essay The rules are principles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morton_devonshire
Damn Morton's gone too, what's going on?

I think people are just getting tired of it all.

Perhaps a lot of introspection is going on?

The Wikipedia philosophy is that the loss of any member is negligible as others will come and take their places. In theory that works, but not in practice. People used to laugh at Esperanza for that kind of thinking.

Well, who's laughing now, Wikipedia?

Ooh, made his password a random string. That'll teach himself.

A scrambled password means you're really leaving. Just ask Jaranda, Giano etc. When he returns, I wonder if he'll be like Jaranda and be unwanting to edit without the sysop bit.

Of course I'm hardly in a position to mock, having left 'n' come back myself - but that was partly a comeback to justify my request for unblock, which spiralled into... well, y'know, Sole Founder, 3650 views, etc. ;-)

Damn Morton's gone too, what's going on?

Well, I think that this situation probably has lead quite a few of the Old Guard to realize that their time is past....It really does seem like a page is turning here...

Damn Morton's gone too, what's going on?

Well, I think that this situation probably has lead quite a few of the Old Guard to realize that their time is past....It really does seem like a page is turning here...

I think it is a combination of GROWING UP (aka Getting a Life) vs. the fact that yeah, the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of repetitive errors gets a bit old after a while.

Unless you are Durova and JeHochman, in which case you thrive on it.

This post has been edited by Disillusioned Lackey: Mon 19th November 2007, 9:48am

... the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of repetitive errors ...

Mathematical intuition suggests that whenever there arises a hellish recursion, there lies beneath a hidden recursion law awaiting discovery, elucidation, and public revelation.

I'm interested in uncovering such hidden recursion laws, because they not only provide insightful explanatory and predictive power for the hellish recursion dynamics, they also provide a divine opportunity to devise an innovative and functional policy for systematically climbing out of hell.

We owe a debt of gratitude to those intrepid gladiators who keep the recursion going, because they supply the raw data stream for gleaning the elusive underlying recursion law in which they have become addictively ensnared and enthralled.

… the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of repetitive errors …

Mathematical intuition suggests that whenever there arises a hellish recursion, there lies beneath a hidden recursion law awaiting discovery, elucidation, and public revelation.

I'm interested in uncovering such hidden recursion laws, because they not only provide insightful explanatory and predictive power for the hellish recursion dynamics, they also provide a divine opportunity to devise an innovative and functional policy for systematically climbing out of hell.

We owe a debt of gratitude to those intrepid gladiators who keep the recursion going, because they supply the raw data stream for gleaning the elusive underlying recursion law in which they have become addictively ensnared and enthralled.

There's a Fixed Point Theorem in Information Domain Theory (a la Dana Scott) that basically just gives mathematical expression to the old saw that «A Fool Who Persists In His Folly Shall Become Wise».

I remember submitting the domain equation for this to a departmental T-shirt design contest that the commons room raconteurs of the math department in A² once organized.

No, I didn't win — those guys just never quite got me.

At any rate, I'm beginning to think that Wikipediots may prove out to be the exception to this rule.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 20th November 2007, 5:06am

There's a Fixed Point Theorem in Information Domain Theory (a la Dana Scott) that basically just gives mathematical expression to the old saw that «A Fool Who Persists In His Folly Shall Become Wise».

I suspect that such an epiphanetic conversion might require a sacrificial catalyst to provide the Bokonomic shove.

I say sacrificial catalyst because of a strange oxymoron. The catalyst can be resurrected, but not within the same play.

Ironically, all parallel plays are the same play -- just with different actors playing the recurring roles.

Keeping this handy, as I expect the Usual Suspects will blank the WP page as soon as they think nobody is looking …

Phil Sandifer's Farewell Address:

There is not presently an effective way to work on this project. Too many people with too many senses of what it means to "write an encyclopedia" collide, and while the article space has means to regulate these differences (NPOV, V, etc) there is no effective means of ordering the creation of policy, and as a result no effective way, in the end, of continuing to order the article space. The failure, nearly two years after the Seigenthaler disaster, to come up with any effective way of writing articles on living people is emblematic of this. So is the continued failure to come up with useful standards for fiction articles that elevate them beyond fannish wankery, or the continued failure to figure out how to deal with the fact that Wikipedia is big enough to have real world consequences for things.

In short, there is no way left to think programmatically about how to improve the project. We are left hoping that Jimbo's increasingly distracted attention will provide a major push for something — as was needed to even fix the basic problems of BLPs. That's not a sustainable model, and given that my interests in Wikipedia have long been as much (if not more) in its meta and policy levels than in its individual articles, the lack of any sustainable model to make progress there leaves me feeling very much out in the cold.

I do not take this as a failure of the wiki model for writing articles. But I cannot find any persuasive evidence that the wiki/consensus model functions on this scale for organizing the project. Instead, article number grows dramatically without a corresponding increase in quality, the methods of improving articles clog up with process, mindless and automated thinking leads to articles getting dismantled in the name of improvement, and it is impossible to usefully have discussions about how to prevent any of this because people are utterly hung up on models of research that do not have any resemblance to anything that actually leads to writing good articles.

In the end, despite a fearsome number of edits in the Wikipedia namespace, I am hard pressed to identify anything substantive I have accomplished in that realm since 2005 when I wrote WP:DICK. And since I've never been a prolific article writer (less so since excessively arduous sourcing requirements got put into place) I can't really point to accomplishments elsewhere.

The project may not have failed, but I seem to have.

It's no wonder that many of the Old Guard are leaving, or fading away, as the saying goes. Wikipedia is just not embued with anything resembling the same New Spirit that I could still detect there a couple of years ago.

Try to imagine — I used to see editors routinely and severely chastized for doing things like deleting discussion page comments, failing to provide evidence for assertions made in discussion, and outright lying. No one trembled in fear at the very audacity of chastizing even the most "chaste" cabal administrator.

You just don't see that any more —

Wormtongue is transcendent
¤
and
¤
toadiness is all

Participating in a "society" where you watch ostensibly trusted leadership making a mockery of every spirit and every letter of the espoused principles on a continual basis, and with near total immunity, causes the followers to lose all respect for those principles and that society.

That is what has happened in Wikipedia.

Do I feel sorry for the Old Guard?

No, they are the Herr Doktor Frankensteins who created the New Guard Monsters that they can no longer control.

So they'll fade from the scene like the weenies they always were, and leave us peasants to pick up the bodies.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 20th November 2007, 3:06pm

I'm not entirely impressed with the New Guard, to be honest.

I've noticed as well all the new admins on the Noticeboard nowadays. They aren't any better than the Old Guard.

Reminds me of Roman history when the empire was collapsing and the barbarians were struggling to take over Rome. None of them wanted to start over and make a brand new empire, rather they all wanted to become Roman emperors. In the end, they ended up destroying the thing they wanted as a result of their greed, ego, and selfishness.

Perhaps that will happen here? Or rather, same play and same script, but different actors?

... the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of repetitive errors ...

Mathematical intuition suggests that whenever there arises a hellish recursion, there lies beneath a hidden recursion law awaiting discovery, elucidation, and public revelation.

Well.

Lather rinse repeat isnt really recursive, unless the suds get deeper and deeper into the skull until it hits basepoint and the suds recurse back iteratively to the scalp.

Maybe that's what when wrong.

… the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of repetitive errors …

Mathematical intuition suggests that whenever there arises a hellish recursion, there lies beneath a hidden recursion law awaiting discovery, elucidation, and public revelation.

Well.

Lather rinse repeat isnt really recursive, unless the suds get deeper and deeper into the skull until it hits basepoint and the suds recurse back iteratively to the scalp.

Maybe that's what went wrong.

There's seems to be a bit of understandable confusion between the Sham-Poo Algorithm (SPA) and the Ass-Wipe Algorithm (AWA).

It's easy to see how Wikipediots might co-con-found those two, but folks who visit here really oughta know better.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 20th November 2007, 5:22am

JzG said the same thing. You'll be back.

Oh look, he couldn't even stay away a whole day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...%27s_Sockpuppet

Looks like Jeeny's tearful goodbye will go to waste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=173199262

Perhaps tearful wasn't the right word.

This post has been edited by Aloft: Fri 23rd November 2007, 6:59pm