NYB on The Volokh Conspiracy, Some First Thoughts on Wikipedia Options

[tarantino]

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242098183.shtml

Ira requests:

I make only one request: that regular Wikipedians who are looking over my shoulder, as well as Wikipedia critics from Wikipedia Review and elsewhere, bear in mind that this is a general-interest audience. Please don't hijack the comment threads with our own internal disputes and debates. No one here wants to read who is a sockpuppet of whom or whether so-and-so's block was fair or not. We have ANI and Wikipedia Review to hash those things out later.

[Jon Awbrey]

Comment on "Wikipedia : Who Runs The Place?" —

My brother the sociologist tells me that the Wiki-Polis is a type of feudal hierarchy known as a "caliphate" or a "shogunate" — there was some distinction between the two, but I forget that part of his lecture.

At any rate, the gist of the ThrasyMachiavellian system of Might Making Right in the Dead Of Night is clear enough — power is transmitted from the WikiPowers That Be On High by the ever-shifting vassalary linkages that connect one oaf of fealty to lower down feudal oafs.

Where are the ArbCommodious Ones in all this?

They are the Clergy, living in a Cloud Cuckoo Land of ideal ideology, divorced from the rude realities of plebe and peon, forever preaching the constantly doctored doctrine that No Body But No Body ever practices, least of all their Holinesses.

Jon Awbrey, 16 May 2009, 10:44am