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

[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

[Jon Awbrey]

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym:

One of the espoused ideals of Wikipedism is often expressed as "Mind the Edits, Not the Editor" — in other words, it is only the value of the content that matters, not the identity of the contributor. This is indeed one of the ways that Wikipediots excuse their use of anonymous sources, the rationalization being that one can always vet the content without having to know the particulars of the person (or bot) who placed it on the page.

Anyone who thinks about it for a second knows this is nonsense in real world terms.

But let us thank the anonymous "administrator" {{citation needed}} Timekeeper for demonstrating how this bit of wiki-preaching works in practice.

Jon Awbrey (his real name), 17 May 2009, 3:16pm

[Somey]

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym...

That's Horologium (T-C-L-K-R-D) , another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger, using the classic but wait folks he isn't telling you that he's banned from Wikipedia!!! rejoinder.

Zzzzzz...

[Jon Awbrey]

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym …

That's Horologium (T-C-L-K-R-D) , another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger, using the classic but wait folks he isn't telling you that he's banned from Wikipedia!!! rejoinder.

Zzzzzz …

How did you know that? It's hard enough keeping up with pseudonyms without getting into meta-pseudonyms …

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

O I C …

Here's my followup —

They never seem to get the point …

I think they must have some sort of rule against it …

Re: Whatzitsnamethisminute

The point being that Wikipediots are as hypocritical about the principal of "Mind the Edits, Not the Editor" as they are about all their other espoused ideals. They spend a fantastic amount of time identifying and trying to discredit anyone who criticizes their ways, doing all of this behind the cover of anonymity and multiple layers of deception.

Jon Awbrey, 17 May 2009, 4:10pm

[dtobias]

another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger

...not that there's anything wrong with that...

[Somey]

...not that there's anything wrong with that...

Not necessarily, anyway. I shouldn't risk alienating any Volokh Conspiracy readers who may be checking out our helpful little website, but the sad fact of it is, there are a lot of Bush-baby Neocon Republicans out there painting themselves as "Independents" and "Libertarians" so that they can avoid the Bush Stigma™ whilst carrying on the fight for various aspects of the Anti-Obama, Anti-Abortion, Pro-Censorship, Anti-Gay, etc. etc., agenda. If I were one of those real libertarians who were into it before it was "cool," dutifully following the smaller-government, fiscal-responsibility agenda, I would be extremely pissed off about this. Unfortunately, there's probably very little they can really do about it.

Then again, maybe they can turn a few of those people into Ron Paul supporters, by getting them really, really drunk the night before Election Day?

[thekohser]

Timekeeper was such a boob, I just had to reply.

[Jon Awbrey]

… not that there's anything wrong with that …

Not necessarily, anyway. I shouldn't risk alienating any Volokh Conspiracy readers who may be checking out our helpful little website, but the sad fact of it is, there are a lot of Bush-baby Neocon Republicans out there painting themselves as "Independents" and "Libertarians" so that they can avoid the Bush Stigma™ whilst carrying on the fight for various aspects of the Anti-Obama, Anti-Abortion, Pro-Censorship, Anti-Gay, etc. etc., agenda. If I were one of those real libertarians who were into it before it was "cool," dutifully following the smaller-government, fiscal-responsibility agenda, I would be extremely pissed off about this. Unfortunately, there's probably very little they can really do about it.

Then again, maybe they can turn a few of those people into Ron Paul supporters, by getting them really, really drunk the night before Election Day?

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

Jon Awbrey

[Somey]

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

Count yourself lucky, then! It may be that I encounter more people like that because I'm a businessman (just not a very successful one at the moment), and you're one of these Academia-with-a-capital-"A" guys. But these folks are definitely out there, trust me on that one...

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

True... Sometimes I wonder, though, to what extent political ideologues take advantage of simple human nature, or maybe I should say good-natured humanity, to achieve their often-nefarious ends on WP. There's actually a Wikipedia article on something called the Abilene paradox (T-H-L-K-D) that sort of explains what I'm thinking here. At first it will probably seem completely inapplicable, because after all WP'ers argue with each other all the time - that's the whole point of WP, in fact - and yet, putting aside whatever specific issue they're arguing about, they're all pretty much in agreement that their participation there is worthwhile and that they should all continue doing it.

[emesee]

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

Count yourself lucky, then! It may be that I encounter more people like that because I'm a businessman (just not a very successful one at the moment), and you're one of these Academia-with-a-capital-"A" guys. But these folks are definitely out there, trust me on that one...

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

True... Sometimes I wonder, though, to what extent political ideologues take advantage of simple human nature, or maybe I should say good-natured humanity, to achieve their often-nefarious ends on WP. There's actually a Wikipedia article on something called the Abilene paradox (T-H-L-K-D) that sort of explains what I'm thinking here. At first it will probably seem completely inapplicable, because after all WP'ers argue with each other all the time - that's the whole point of WP, in fact - and yet, putting aside whatever specific issue they're arguing about, they're all pretty much in agreement that their participation there is worthwhile and that they should all continue doing it.

so what you are perhaps saying is that even though on an individual basis they may have been attempting to do the right thing, due to interactions at the group level, perhaps, on an individual /and/ collective basis, all they could see was bad and worse choices?




perhaps.

[Jon Awbrey]

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

Count yourself lucky, then! It may be that I encounter more people like that because I'm a businessman (just not a very successful one at the moment), and you're one of these Academia-with-a-capital-"A" guys. But these folks are definitely out there, trust me on that one …

Out there I'm sure they are — I'm just talking about our local garden variety and the fruits of all the blog'n'villas.

I think the dynamic must be something like this. Hooray for Individual Liberty! But Corporations are Individuals. Ergo, Hooray for Corporations! At any rate, this appears to be the "logic" of Randroids. Of course, any corporation that is owned by its workers instead of some Wind-In-The-Hair Aviator-Scarfed Smilin' Jackbooter Pointing The Way To That Shiny-Metal-Bot City On The Hill gets disqualified as a communist abomination.

And stop calling me those Capital "A" names. Just because I spent my whole "adult" life in and out of universities doesn't mean I didn't spend the whole time criticizing establishment ways of doing things — I wanted nothing better than seeing a new way of distributing knowledge succeed.

Hence the irony …

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

True … Sometimes I wonder, though, to what extent political ideologues take advantage of simple human nature, or maybe I should say good-natured humanity, to achieve their often-nefarious ends on WP. There's actually a Wikipedia article on something called the Abilene paradox (T-H-L-K-D) that sort of explains what I'm thinking here. At first it will probably seem completely inapplicable, because after all WP'ers argue with each other all the time — that's the whole point of WP, in fact — and yet, putting aside whatever specific issue they're arguing about, they're all pretty much in agreement that their participation there is worthwhile and that they should all continue doing it.

Yep, I spent a week in Abilene one night …

And a not-so-healthy dose of Cognitive Dissonance, too.

Jon

[Newyorkbrad]

The Wikipedia Signpost has now linked to this thread. Does this mean that WR is now a GOODSITE?

[Daniel Brandt]

NYB, when are you going to put your name on your user page? Cool_Hand_Luke should do it too.

[Newyorkbrad]

NYB, when are you going to put your name on your user page? Cool_Hand_Luke should do it too.

I actually had planned to do it this week, as I mentioned in this thread last week. I might well have done it when I returned to editing last summer, but I didn't particularly appreciate the feeling of being coerced into it.

[Jon Awbrey]

The Wikipedia Signpost has now linked to this thread. Does this mean that WR is now a GOODSITE?

It means that WR is in danger of passing from irreverence to irrevelance.

Jon

[The Joy]

The Wikipedia Signpost has now linked to this thread. Does this mean that WR is now a GOODSITE?

It means that WR is in danger of passing from irreverence to irrevelance.

Jon

We're slowly becoming more like the Village Pump than the Sewage Treatment Plant, aren't we?

I would like to think at least that people who come to this forum will look at Wikipedia more closely and think twice about using it as a reference source.

It is still scary to me to think that a website that is the number one site of the number one search engine can have so much power over knowledge and how people assimilate information.

All I know to do as an aspiring librarian is to teach people how to vet and analyze information. Hopefully, they would realize that Wikipedia fails as a reliable source. Still, I'm only one man and not everyone listens to their librarians or teachers, you know?

Maybe Wikipedia Review can help? I don't know. After all this forum's been through last year and early this year, I'm just not sure anymore. I know I've been part of problem by focusing on the gossip and character antics of Wikipedia and not the deeper things, but I just don't know how to steer in the right direction.

It's all too depressing.

[Daniel Brandt]

I actually had planned to do it this week, as I mentioned in this thread last week. I might well have done it when I returned to editing last summer, but I didn't particularly appreciate the feeling of being coerced into it.

Maybe the move would be easier if the User pages has a "noindex" just like the User_talk pages do. I think there is more work to be done on the "noindex" front. It's true that your user page would most likely be in the top ten results in a search for your real name, because your real name is unusual and Google is infatuated with everything from Wikipedia.

That's all the more reason to level the field by adopting a "noindex" policy for all User pages. It might even take the wind out of some of those pesky teenage editors if they were unable to get a hormone kick from their Google juice.

[Somey]

The Wikipedia Signpost has now linked to this thread. Does this mean that WR is now a GOODSITE?

It's all your fault! You've ruined everything!

I prefer to see this as one of those "slow news day" types of incidents, personally.

[Milton Roe]

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)

I'm not convinced that small government people elected "Feds will fix your K-12" Bush in 2000. I think it was simply a knee jerk reaction against "Feds will control every aspect of your lives to make Earth better" Gore. And a near thing it was, too. After eight years of Clinton and Wife, it was time to see if maybe the Feds couldn't start minding their own business. And except for the schools and presumably a lot more pork-barrelled baseball stadiums, it might even have worked if bin Laden hadn't attacked us so successfully.

Then came 9/11 and everybody started acting paranoid and you couldn't tell Republicans from Democrats for the longest time, which is how we GOT the term "NEO-Con." After 9/11 even liberal New Yorkers wanted to go somewhere far away and bomb the shit out of somebody. Anybody. This lasted right through 2004. Or at least enough of it did to put Bush in a second time.

Had 9/11 not happened, I think we'd have seen 8 years of harmless muddling and probably less government than we'd have gotten with Gore. Sure the environment would have suffered more than it would have under Gore, but I doubt Gore would have seen the housing/borrowing bubble coming, either. That was a 7 trillion dollar pot of equity just waiting to be invaded, borrowed, and spent living the good-life, by everybody (both Republicans and Democrats-- we're talking everybody whose mortage is underwater right now-- which is a quarter of them). And I think it would have happened, no matter who was at the helm.

And thus, absent 9/11, we'd be right here at the same place, except without the extra trillion or so of debt that we've spent on Iraq. Which would be a help right now, but with 7 trillion of US housing debt, that doesn't mean everything would have been fine. I'll bet 25 cents Gore would have figured out some way to spend a pile of his own social program money, had he been elected.

It's not clear to me that Bush's No Child Left Behind could have possibly spent as much money as our military expenses the first 8 years of this century, as a Gore Democrats-Gone-Wild program (think Obama with training wheels) would have. There's just no way to dump that much money INTO K-12 education in such a short time. They'd have had to have kids riding to magnet schools in solid gold cadillacs.

So, absent 9/11 (and that's a big thing which nobody forsaw in 2000), I think we'd be in marginally better shape right now, with Repuplicans.

Anyway, don't blame any of this present Perfect Economic Storm on libertarians. Conservatives, sure. Liberals, sure. Homeowners and Preditory Banks and idiot economics with these new derivative weapons of mass financial destruction-- sure. Geez, the whole government of Iceland went belly up when fisherman made enough money to buy banks and leverage them at 30:1 fractional reserve. And that's with essentially no defense spending crisis or 9/11, there.

Anyway, libertarians, no way is their thinking especially responsible for this. Do you think the people of Iceland are libertarians? Hell, they're more or less watermellon Green-outside Red-inside eco-socialists. With a good non-pathological highly-educated culture. Gore's wet dream. They got pounded by the global housing bubble, anyway. Just as Gore would have.