The Use Of Pseudonyms Is a Prima Facie Symptom, Of Emotional, Mental, And Moral Dysfunction (EMAMD) Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

Resolved —

The Use Of Pseudonyms Is A Prima Facie Symptom Of Emotional, Mental, And Moral Dysfunction

'Nuff Said

Jon

Notice. Pseudonymaniacs Anonymous Meets Here Wednesday Mornings, 3:00 AM.

This post has been edited by Jon Awbrey: Sat 26th April 2008, 2:24pm

[Jon Awbrey]

Moulton,

Put down the mouse, step away from the keyboard, and go see 5 or 6 first-rate plays by professional acting companies — I realize this may be a bit of a challenge in a culturally impoverished backwater like Boston, so you may have to go on the road. When I say Drama, that's what I'm talking about. When you say Drama, you don't know what yer talking about.

Did you see A Disappearing Number? I'm pretty sure Boston was on its itinerary. Highly Recommended.

Jon

In the subject areas I work on, there are so many new articles to write, it's staggering. You could give me a team, and I could assign each member of the team several new articles to write each day (including expanding substubs, since that's essentially writing a new article) related to politics in developing countries, and I'm confident we could keep going for a long, long time, even without factoring in anything new from the world post-2008.

Pursuant to what Jon just posted above, I sort of misstated that thing I said above. The problem in terms of growth vs. maintenance has nothing to do with the problem of finding individual article titles to write, it's all about topic-area territorialism. The WP:OWN rules are never going to be enough to even put a serious dent in that, particularly if you see it as a perceptual problem more than an actual one.

What's more, stubs don't really count, because the newly-arrived mark might just as easily assume that someone else has created the stub specifically to mark out their territory, which presumably will then be defended. That's why each stub has a template on it saying "you can help Wikipedia by expanding it", but that's not enough either. People want virgin territory, topic areas that haven't been despoiled by others having gotten there first to plant the flag. And there's precious little virgin territory left on WP, if any, other than a given current event that just happened. Even there, you end up with "land rush" scenarios where people vie to be the one who writes the first article about a newly-occurring event or object.

Anyway, this is getting a bit off-topic, and I wouldn't blame Jon for wanting to split the thread. However, it might be more relevant if we take the idea a bit further, and ask if a new mark entering the game is more or less likely to dive in when he/she is using his/her real name, and the people already in control of that topic area/territory are not. I'd say less likely, but I'm something of a cynic when it comes to stuff like that.

Again with the Snow-Blindness. Only Da Rubes Care About Da Con-Tent. Jimbo Crack Corn No Matter What. And WMF Don't Care Either Way.

Now I know that you've written and tested software before, so you really ought to recognize the Phase that you're looking at. It's the Testing On Random Data (TORD) Phase.

Jon

[Somey]

Again with the Snow-Blindness. Only Da Rubes Care About Da Con-Tent. Jimbo Crack Corn No Matter What. And WMF Don't Care Either Way.

Okay, so who's brushing away the blue-tail fly in this scenario?

And you wonder why this isn't a more popular subforum!

Now I know that you've written and tested software before, so you really ought to recognize the Phase that you're looking at. It's the Testing On Random Data (TORD) Phase.

I never have to do testing - everything *I* do is perfect on first run.