Wiki-Induced Kognitive Insufficiency (WIKI), Enough Symptomatics! What Is The Cause? Options Rating

[Jonny Cache]

"In order to learn you must desire to learn …"

"Ay, there's the rub …"

What is it, then, about Wikipedia, if not indeed about the whole wiki paradigm, that is proving to be such a massive failure in promoting the sharing of information, learning, knowledge, wisdom, all that good stuff — at least once that critical threshold is passed, in the direction of increasingly uncritical thought?

Well, I know the dynamics of our own sweet Etopia well enough to know that nothing so meditative will compete with the Main Distraction on the Midway this week … or the next … but I thought I might leave this note to self, just in case things get dull toward the Ides.

P.S. I was going to call it Wiki-Induced Learning Disorder but the acronym WILD might have made it sound like a good thing.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Mon 3rd March 2008, 2:01pm

[Moulton]

That 5-stage model is due to Professor Rene Girard, Emeritus of Stanford University.

I've adapted it on several occasions to specific contexts.

[Jonny Cache]

That 5-stage model is due to Professor Rene Girard, Emeritus of Stanford University.

I've adapted it on several occasions to specific contexts.

What you are not doing with your canned re*printings of old blog postings is adapting them to the specific question e-nunciated above. The mission — and nothing says you have to accept it — is to seek out first and debug later specific features of Wikipedia's Social-Technical Architecture that are causally implicated in its debilitating effect on people's desire to learn. As indicated by the subtitle, this demands something more than yet another dramatic description of symptomology — something that we've all been quite capable of doing till we laugh or cry or throw up — it requires plausible hypotheses about which actual features of the system are primarily responsible for the Induced Learning Lesions (ILL's).

I am sorry if I evince a certain urgency about this, but I feel pressed to get down to the brass tacks of identifying root causes, before we end up with too many more Wiki-Crack Babies on our hands.

No one wants to see that …

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 5th March 2008, 7:44pm