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

[AB]

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.

WP:No original research ?

Learning often involves 'original research'. And then some
WP members have a strange tendency of trying to apply
WP rules such as WP:NOR outside of WP.

And there's the question of how people become so
convinced that that rule is so great.

[Jonny Cache]

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.

WP:No Original Research?

Learning often involves 'original research'. And then some WP members have a strange tendency of trying to apply WP rules such as WP:NOR outside of WP.

And there's the question of how people become so convinced that that rule is so great.

Legend has it that WP:NOR was inserted in the Wikipedian Credo by His Nibs Jimbo Wales hisownself, unlike most of the other Tenets Of Credulity, that were made Holy Orders by Larry Sanger. According to the story, Jimbo was timidly leary of the crackpot theories of physics that were beginning to bedevil his E-Cyclops.

When I first started working on Wikipedia in late 2005 the Big Three Policies of WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, and WP:VER were still recognizable approximations to the usual academic standards and scholarly practices. There were one or two strange paragraphs in WP:NOR — that I can see in retrospect had SlimVirgin's hand in them — but they didn't come up all that often at first.

The line between Creative Writing and Research Papers ("with footnotes 'n' everthing") is something that I learned about in Junior High or High School, and the difference between Original Research and Survey Articles was always clear enough from all the journals that I read thereafter. Wikipedia could have opted to be something more than a traditional encyclopedia, but it was always a perfectly sensible choice to toe the line of past encyclopedias and limit itself to Sourced Research. So far so good. Nothing about this should have been the occasion for one damn WikiPutsch after another.

But Wikipedia's Social Policy Architecture is no longer a reasonable facsimile of academic and scholarly standards and practices. SlimVirgin and her SlimVestals have relentlessly mutated WP:NOR and WP:VER into something that can only be called SlimVirgin's Personal Epistemological Theory (SV:PET).

Sorry, Slimmy, That Dog Don't Hunt. There is no sensible knowledge resource that can move forward on the basis of SV:PET.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Thu 6th March 2008, 2:24pm

[AB]

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.

WP:No Original Research?

Learning often involves 'original research'. And then some WP members have a strange tendency of trying to apply WP rules such as WP:NOR outside of WP.

And there's the question of how people become so convinced that that rule is so great.

Legend has it that WP:NOR was inserted in the Wikipedian Credo by His Nibs Jimbo Wales hisownself, unlike most of the other Tenets Of Credulity, that were made Holy Orders by Larry Sanger. According to the story, Jimbo was timidly leary of the crackpot theories of physics that were beginning to bedevil his E-Cyclops.

When I first started working on Wikipedia in late 2005 the Big Three Policies of WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, and WP:VER were still recognizable approximations to the usual academic standards and scholarly practices. There were one or two strange paragraphs in WP:NOR — that I can see in retrospect had SlimVirgin's hand in them — but they didn't come up all that often at first.

The line between Creative Writing and Research Papers ("with footnotes 'n' everthing") is something that I learned about in Junior High or High School, and the difference between Original Research and Survey Articles was always clear enough from all the journals that I read thereafter. Wikipedia could have opted to be something more than a traditional encyclopedia, but it was always a perfectly sensible choice to toe the line of past encyclopedias and limit itself to Sourced Research. So far so good. Nothing about this should have been the occasion for one damn WikiPutsch after another.

But Wikipedia's Social Policy Architecture is no longer a reasonable facsimile of academic and scholarly standards and practices. SlimVirgin and her SlimVestals have relentlessly mutated WP:NOR and WP:VER into something that can only be called SlimVirgin's Personal Epistemological Theory (SV:PET).

Sorry, Slimmy, That Dog Don't Hunt. There is no sensible knowledge resource that can move forward on the basis of SV:PET.

Jonny B)

Well, back when I was there, there were many more people
working on those policies than just SV. So I don't really think
she should be singled out.

But, focusing on the policies themselves....

Sticking to sourced research is one thing, but let's say that,
by original research, you can prove that the sourced statement
is false. To up the stakes, let's say the sourced statement is a
negative statement about a living person. Now, if, in full
knowledge that the statement is negative and untrue, you
include it anyway, wouldn't that count as 'reckless disregard for
the truth' in defamation proceedings? In other words, not
including things that are only known by original research is
fine and dandy, but original research should be a justification
for exclusion.

And then there's the fact that the original research policy has
become so tight that if you even change the wording of your
sourced statement to avoid plagiarism, people will yell at you
for original research. Unless you want to have an article
consisting of nothing but a string of quotes....

And when did some WP members become so convinced that
no original research should be applied to all areas of life that
they yell at people for having original research on their blogs?