QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Sat 1st September 2007, 7:50am)
QUOTE(Unrepentant Vandal @ Sat 1st September 2007, 4:49am)
In fact, I would go as far as to say that most informants are probably not aware that they are informants.
Come on now, don't pull your punches. Maybe Essjay really did have two doctorates, one in theology and one in canon law, and he was telling the truth to
The New Yorker. But then nearly a year later, he forgot that he had them, and was incorrectly outed as a 24-year-old community-college dropout. I guess we'll never know.
When I used the term "informant," I was referring to what the journalist told me about Linda Mack. He clearly believes that Mack was a
paid informant. Sorry, but he didn't have any MI5 pay stubs with Linda Mack's name on them to fax to me.
I think Wikipedians are missing the point of all this. No, it's even worse than that. They're standing on their heads and covering their ears with their hands, to make sure they're missing the point.
To me, the point is that despite the bullshit pushed by Wikipedians about the wonderful world of Web 2.0 social networking, and how it is so transparent and comprehensive that truth inevitably rises to the top from the very depths of society's long tail, what you really have at Wikipedia is a structure that is far less transparent, and far, far less accountable, than any other entity that has ever called itself an encyclopedia.
Whether Slim is the slickest thing since James Bond, or a bungling, wannabe role-player, doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that she
could be a paid disinformation agent on a mission to build a secret foundation underneath Wikipedia, and so could Jayjg, and so could Jimbo and the ArbCom,
and you would never know it unless someday they all decided to tell you.Pull Our Punches ? (POP ?) — PULL OUR PUNCHES !? (POP !?)
Dem's Fightin' Words Whar I Come From !!!
Which is why I left …
I think we're pretty much agreed that SlimVirgin is a paid, or at least well-endowed in the CAN$ sense, Disinformation Operative On Some Kind Of Mission (DOOSKOM).
But the question is one of achieving Undeniable Plausibility. Saying a lot of stuff that doesn't add up does nothing more than give them exactly what they want, their favorite changeling for Truth and Verifiability, to wit, or not,
WP:Plausible Deniability.
The question is : What kind of DOOSKOM is she, exactly?
There are many different kinds of DOOSKOM in this world of ours, most of 'em not nearly as thrilling to speckelate about as even the most humdrum tindrum spy gamer, folks like Karl Rove, just to rip a random ranger from recent headlines.
If I had to pick the Big Pixel that everyone is oversighting, er, overlooking, it would be this:
The Current Content of Wikipedia is all a Big Distraction —
It's all just a Big Batch of fill-in-the-blank playtester-supplied test data that is needed to prime the pumps of an ongoing programming project, one that is aimed at constructing a particular kind of global software medium.
This is hardly my OR — Marshall McLuhan (Canadian !!!) said it all long ago :
The Medium Is The Massage …
This is why people, if they're smart not Smart, need to quit wasting so much time fighting over the Red Herrings, and start looking at the Shape of the Barrel.
Things like WP:P&G, aka,
SV:TOR.
Jonny