IRC examples, let's have them please Options

[Peter Damian]

As another strand of my work for the UK Charity Commission on how well WMUK is controlling and monitoring Wikipedia, I would like recent IRC logs. The smuttier and more juvenile, the better. Extra barnstars for prominent Wikipedians involved.

Thanking you all in advance!

[Kelly Martin]

My first response was flippant but intended to make a point which I think Peter grokked. However, there's another reason: most of Wikipedia's editors are, intellectually and emotionally, quite immature. They just don't think about these things, because thinking is too much bother. Once they have an answer that satisfies them, that's what they're going with, even if it comes down to "Because Joe said so" (provided that Joe is someone he trusts), and even if that answer is inconsistent with the answer they selected for the last, virtually identical, situation.

Simply put, Peter, your problem is that you think too much.

[EricBarbour]

However, there's another reason: most of Wikipedia's editors are, intellectually and emotionally, quite immature. They just don't think about these things, because thinking is too much bother. Once they have an answer that satisfies them, that's what they're going with, even if it comes down to "Because Joe said so" (provided that Joe is someone he trusts), and even if that answer is inconsistent with the answer they selected for the last, virtually identical, situation.

Simply put, Peter, your problem is that you think too much.

That's the ticket. They are man-children--the exact same kind of creature that posts pics of cute puppies and kitties (or whines when they lose their job) on Reddit, or that argues (at great disturbing length) about Battlestar Galactica on Metafilter, or that calls each other "faggots" on 4chan. Joe Reagle is simply another "useful idiot" they can rely on to generate propaganda about their "project". They have to keep it going, because it's their little hole in the wall. It gives them something to do, and it has a very thin veneer of "importance" to it.

I keep telling Peter that we are dealing with utterly irrational, immature people, most of them under the age of 25, nearly all of them male, all of them the product of a hyperactive TV-and-video-game-and-sugared-cereal culture. And he keeps thinking that we've "missed something" in the analysis. Wikipedians are essentially the polar opposite of medieval philosophers--they don't sit down and cogitate, they sit down and react to things. They arm-flap.

Any group that had a shred of human decency or intellectual sophistication would have tossed out that bastard Ironholds by now. But they don't--because he's another "useful idiot". It makes them feel good to call each other (and outsiders) juvenile names on an IRC channel, so they indulge. They probably think Ironholds' putdowns are "funny".

I keep telling anyone who will listen: Wikipedia is just like the Open Directory Project, or like the KDE software project. Eventually they will drive out ALL new editors, screw everything down, and sit there and grind the database into total incoherence. But stupid college students will KEEP USING IT. Until someone invents a new "playland" for the insiders to go and trash.