The WikiPedia Medium Is The WikiPedia Massage, What Is The Real Purpose Of The WikiProgramme? Options

[Jonny Cache]

Picking up on one of Kato's «Key Questions» and generalizing another:

• What is the root problem in Wikipedia?
• What do all of these episodes we keep watching have in common?

I suggest that the answer will come from pursuing the question:

What is the real purpose of those who control Wikipedia?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think we have to watch every last episode of the Wikipediot Soap Opera, much less every spin-off like Citzendium, ConservaToryPedia, VergoPedia, AdNauseaPedia that comes down the WikiPike in order to figure out the answer to this question once and for all.

So permit me to extract my most recent mini-manifesto on this score from the pages of the Soap Opera Digest (SOD) — where it is likely to get buried beneath the fray of WhoScrewedWhoToday — and reprint it here.

I keep trying to share what clues I've gathered, but folks at The Wikipedia Review are as just as blind as folks at Wikipedia and all the clueless InterNeuts in the Wowie-Zowie-Web-O-Sphere.

Maybe folks didn't read the same books My Generation did in school and college. The scenario was laid out clearly enough in all of those Prophetically Dystopian novels of my childhood, and the basic principles of media dynamics that are involved in Wikipediac Devolution were all laid out by Marshall McLuhan so long ago that they passed from Archetype to Cliche when I was an Undergrub, and apparently into Oblivion now.

You all keep being distracted by one damn Message after another when you ought to be looking at the kind of Medium that is being so craftily crafted under your very noses.

For example, people on all sides waste so gawdawful much time trying to figure out what side the Cabal is on — when it comes to this or that economic, political, religious, or scientific tiff.

The Cabal is not on any side but the Cabal's side.

Sure, maybe the Cabal is taking the side of North-North-West Eurasia today, but it can just as easily shift to taking the side of Southerly Eurasia any time that it becomes convenient to do so.

What does that mean for the Media Operating Characteristic (MOC) that will selected as their Most Favoured MOC?

It means that their Most Favoured MOC cannot allow itself to get phase-locked forever into any one POV. More precisely, it must be agile enough to shift its phase 180° in a period of time just ε-greater than the modal attention span of the viewing public.

How long is that?

Your Mullage May Vary, but if we look at the US case in the last Dubya-Dubya Police Action, the US media were reporting on the Future Sea Battle for just about 6 months before it started to look downright silly not to go ahead and have it.

Six months is not exactly turning on a dime, and I think that the Powers That Bee are probably trying to get that down to a temporal turning radius ≤ 6 weeks.

For now …

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sat 15th December 2007, 3:36pm

[Jonny Cache]

One of the ways to avoid shattered expectations is to organize around an express Social Contract. That's not a very popular approach, although it's been used in some notable Linux open source projects. Google also has a Social Contract with its employees.

Wikipedia has expressly rebuffed the idea of a Social Contract model.

I do not know how you took them, but I read Wikipedia's mass of policy and guideline pages as an implicit social contract. I held up my end of the bargain — those who arrogated to themselves the name of "community" did not.

Jon Awbrey

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 19th December 2007, 6:06pm