Are they all crazy at German Wikipedia?, Wondering after a specific incident Options

[CharlotteWebb]

The German Wikipedia does have certain cultural differences from the English one. For one, it's more authoritarian. While the English Wikipedia at least attempts to keep up the appearance of assuming good faith, the German one has a policy called Sei grausam ("be horrible"), which says that if someone is out of line, it's better to just come down with the banhammer as quickly as possible. Basically, admins are the bosses, and if someone disagrees with any action performed by an admin or contributor with more seniority, they're likely to get booted real quick.

It opens with a hopefully apocryphal quote by Larry Sanger, about making projects more attractive to experts/academics by driving out all those "mediocre" editors who work for a living and are thus disruptive by default.

[Peter Damian]

The German Wikipedia does have certain cultural differences from the English one. For one, it's more authoritarian. While the English Wikipedia at least attempts to keep up the appearance of assuming good faith, the German one has a policy called Sei grausam ("be horrible"), which says that if someone is out of line, it's better to just come down with the banhammer as quickly as possible. Basically, admins are the bosses, and if someone disagrees with any action performed by an admin or contributor with more seniority, they're likely to get booted real quick.

Interesting they have the same word for troll

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Netzkultur)

[dogbiscuit]

The German Wikipedia does have certain cultural differences from the English one. For one, it's more authoritarian. While the English Wikipedia at least attempts to keep up the appearance of assuming good faith, the German one has a policy called Sei grausam ("be horrible"), which says that if someone is out of line, it's better to just come down with the banhammer as quickly as possible. Basically, admins are the bosses, and if someone disagrees with any action performed by an admin or contributor with more seniority, they're likely to get booted real quick.

It opens with a hopefully apocryphal quote by Larry Sanger, about making projects more attractive to experts/academics by driving out all those "mediocre" editors who work for a living and are thus disruptive by default.

...which seems reasonable, aside from the knowledge that self-appointed guardians of the Internet isn't necessarily a recipe for success.

I noticed that the well-meaning crowd of FreeCycle have had a major schism with their founding founder who wanted to retain control and was booting out admins left right and centre. They did the fork thing and now we have Freegle instead.

[Law Lord]

Basically, admins are the bosses, and if someone disagrees with any action performed by an admin or contributor with more seniority, they're likely to get booted real quick.

Definitely that is how it works; which is why I stand by my previous conclusion that these people are in need of treatment. They are also bad people because they refuse treatment and continue their sick ways. However, having a sectarian cultural interface is probably difficult to treat?

I understand now, what it is in German spirit that has resulted in some very poor choices over the course of recent history. How sad that this is reflected so clearly by the behaviour of the members of deWiki.

When these people (deWiki people) make so poor choices in simple human interaction (rendering themselves the Herrenvolk and every outsider an inferior) it certainly poses the question: how can anybody trust the validity of anything they write at all?

[Cedric]

The German Wikipedia does have certain cultural differences from the English one. For one, it's more authoritarian. While the English Wikipedia at least attempts to keep up the appearance of assuming good faith, the German one has a policy called Sei grausam ("be horrible"), which says that if someone is out of line, it's better to just come down with the banhammer as quickly as possible. Basically, admins are the bosses, and if someone disagrees with any action performed by an admin or contributor with more seniority, they're likely to get booted real quick.

Sounds like the sort of place Abraham Lincoln referred to "where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy".

[Appleby]

Interesting they have the same word for troll

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Netzkultur)

Quite the international word, and originally Norwegian methinks.

[Law Lord]

Sounds like the sort of place Abraham Lincoln referred to "where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy".

You said it better than I could.

[Somey]

I understand now, what it is in German spirit that has resulted in some very poor choices over the course of recent history. How sad that this is reflected so clearly by the behaviour of the members of deWiki.

To be fair, I doubt that a cultural emphasis on efficiency, order, and "security" normally results in a mass tendency towards racism, religious persecution, or the devaluation of human life - at least not in most societies. It probably does result in authoritarianism though, along with a rigidly hierarchical power structure and a near-obsession with rules, making it an ideal proving ground for Wikipedianism.

Germans are NOT stupid people; most of them know that the mistakes of the past must (or at least should) never be repeated. Unfortunately, they've yet to realize what a mistake Wikipedia is... Hopefully, time will fix that.

When these people (deWiki people) make so poor choices in simple human interaction ...(snip)... it certainly poses the question: how can anybody trust the validity of anything they write at all?

Well, THAT you could say of almost any culture that produces a Wikimedia project. Each national/ethnic culture has its own idiosyncrasies, and any encyclopedia-like websites produced by those cultures will reflect them. That's just another reason why people should want their encyclopedias to be produced by properly-trained, unbiased academics and publishers, rather than cultures.

[GlassBeadGame]

Germans are NOT stupid people; most of them know that the mistakes of the past must (or at least should) never be repeated. Unfortunately, they've yet to realize what a mistake Wikipedia is... Hopefully, time will fix that.

It has impressed me greatly the generations of Germans since WWII have conducted themselves in a manner that is just about everything you could ask from a people whose nation has a recent past of horrible wrongdoing. As a society they have faced their past without avoiding blame or making excuses, readily acknowledging responsibility.

[Random832]

It has impressed me greatly the generations of Germans since WWII have conducted themselves in a manner that is just about everything you could ask from a people whose nation has a recent past of horrible wrongdoing. As a society they have faced their past without avoiding blame or making excuses, readily acknowledging responsibility.

Though that in turn requires one to take it as read that an individual born after 1945 should take "responsibility" for the events of WWII (which is of course distinct from the responsibility to do their part to prevent such things from happening again)

This post has been edited by Random832: Mon 21st September 2009, 4:43am

[GlassBeadGame]

It has impressed me greatly the generations of Germans since WWII have conducted themselves in a manner that is just about everything you could ask from a people whose nation has a recent past of horrible wrongdoing. As a society they have faced their past without avoiding blame or making excuses, readily acknowledging responsibility.

Though that in turn requires one to take it as read that an individual born after 1945 should take "responsibility" for the events of WWII (which is of course distinct from the responsibility to do their part to prevent such things from happening again)

Thus the "As a society" part. Compare this to the less admirable response of of white people in America in relation to racism and exploitation of black people. This is all the worse because unlike the devastation of WWII which had the practical effect of leveling away any gain German society had ever seen from their fleeting conquests, white people in America have never disgorged what was gained through exploitation. Currently any attempt doing anything to redress these historic wrongs and their lingering effects is decried as "reverse racism."

[Somey]

Though that in turn requires one to take it as read that an individual born after 1945 should take "responsibility" for the events of WWII (which is of course distinct from the responsibility to do their part to prevent such things from happening again)

There's a scene in The Reader (which takes place in a university lecture hall, of course) that touches on this. It suggested that Germans born after 1945 were, more than anything, quite angry at their forebears for putting them in the position of having to rebuild both the country's physical devastation and their national reputation within the civilized world. (As one would expect, I suppose.)

But what we were originally talking about in this thread wasn't really anti-semitism or genocide or even out-of-control military expansionism - we were actually talking about France-bashing, and there are plenty of Americans and English folks who do that (among others). Most of it is unwarranted, IMO.

There's a spy novel I like to recommend called The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst, in which a (note: SPOILERS!!!) French attache in 1938 Warsaw all but proves that the Germans are going to send their tanks through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium to invade France, rather than challenge the Maginot Line, but the French General Staff ignores him because Marshal Petain's reputation depends on that not being a possibility. There's a legitimate argument that if it hadn't been for Petain's insistence on this, the Germans could have been stopped in Northern France, and it would have been a simple matter for British and American forces to land on the continent and help drive them back into Germany. OTOH, if that had happened, it's also possible that the Nazi regime might have made peace with the French, and even survived long enough to develop atomic bombs. So who knows - maybe Petain did everybody a favor.

Ahh, the vagaries of history...

[CharlotteWebb]

Interesting they have the same word for troll

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Netzkultur)

Quite the international word, and originally Norwegian methinks.

That seems to be the case.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...ndpost&p=189898

[Herschelkrustofsky]

There's a spy novel I like to recommend called The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst, in which a (note: SPOILERS!!!) French attache in 1938 Warsaw all but proves that the Germans are going to send their tanks through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium to invade France, rather than challenge the Maginot Line, but the French General Staff ignores him because Marshal Petain's reputation depends on that not being a possibility. There's a legitimate argument that if it hadn't been for Petain's insistence on this, the Germans could have been stopped in Northern France, and it would have been a simple matter for British and American forces to land on the continent and help drive them back into Germany.

Well, that's interesting, because at least on the surface you seem to agree with LaRouche on this point:

I have warned against the silly, but popularized myth, the myth that it was France's preoccupation with the development of the Maginot Line which facilitated the German victory on that occasion. The rout of the greater part of France's military forces then, was chiefly the contribution of a pro-Synarchist "Fifth Column" inside the leading French military and other institutions, in the sense of the role of the "Fifth Column" which had just previously produced the victory of the fascist dictator Franco in 1930s Spain. The Synarchist influences from inside France's institutions left the gate wide open for what should have been considered the probable German course of action.

...That "Fifth Column" inside 1940 France was what is known as the same Synarchist International later represented by the regimes of Nazi-occupied France, as represented by the offshoot of Lazard Freres-related banking groups known as Banque Worms. This circle within France, had been the pivotal element of the post-Versailles Treaty drive toward the use of fascism as a tool for creating a globalized system, echoing the ultramontane imperial system of the Venetian financier-oligarchy and Norman chivalry, and also the Napoleonic model. (1)

[InkBlot]

Am I missing a joke here, or is my German worse than I think (and really, I'm not sure it's possible for me to think any worse of my German and still admit I know any)? Looking at the edit which began all this, it, um, looks to be a penis joke. Which would kinda explain the reaction, at least to me. Sooooooooooo.......

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Wow, they are crazy at German wikipedia.

Account blocked indefinitely at 19. September 2009, 14:40 UTC.

For "lack of intent for encyclopaedic cooperation".

Review my entire user contributions (very short) and tell me more.

Actually, Charlotte is right, and your history of contributions doesn't demonstrate much intent beyond basic goofiness.

[Law Lord]

Looking at the edit which began all this, it, um, looks to be a penis joke. Which would kinda explain the reaction, at least to me. Sooooooooooo.......

Not a joke but a statement of fact, which was reverted, after which I edited the article no further.

So no, not really any reasonable explanation for the reaction from the deWiki common herd.
I wish that could explain it since then the reaction would at least make some sense.

[Shalom]

Why don't y'all ban me from WR already, y'all hate me anyway.

[Law Lord]

Actually, Charlotte is right, and your history of contributions doesn't demonstrate much intent beyond basic goofiness.

You think it is "basic goofiness" to ask an administrator to remove an anti-French image? Or to discuss article content?

I think you are probably quite active on deWiki.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Looking at the edit which began all this, it, um, looks to be a penis joke. Which would kinda explain the reaction, at least to me. Sooooooooooo.......

Not a joke but a statement of fact, which was reverted, after which I edited the article no further.

If, hypothetically, we were to buy your claim that it was not a joke, then it's Original Research™.