I'm setting aside this space to write out some objectives that I hope a few folks will join in furthering.

But it's Saturday Night, and it may be Monday Morning before I can get organized.

Jon Awbrey

Dynamic Page

Modulating Maxims

Learning arises in the face-off between abstract concepts and concrete data.

Data are the pins that pop the balloons of hypothesis, but any attempt to avoid that risk puts a stop to learning altogether.

The endless recounting of data just like the data we already have is not enough to produce learning.

Criticism is not a simple matter of fault-finding — it means considering a thing within a field of competing alternatives and carrying out a comparative evaluation.

Random Reflections

Personal Perspective

Wikipedia is just not an interesting project anymore — at a distance somewhere between 40,000 feet and 8 miles high, I feel well beyond its field of distraction — the only thing that gives me pause when I start to walk away from it is the nagging fear that it might come after me one day in the future. Meaning that it's just the sort of thing that might grow in the dark of our ignorance and obliviscence until it came to threaten the things that we care about, no matter where we might think to escape its influence.

Jon Awbrey

Trying to see if I can split a topic …

Waddayaknow, it really really works —

The tangent discussion on the theme of pop culture idolatry has been transplanted here.

Jonny

It is clear that Wikipedia is stuck in the rut of every other feedback-intolerant belief system that I've ever had the bad luck to encounter in the past, and I don't see anything novel or surprising — much less anything of significance to be learned — from watching yet another slow-motion brain wreck like that. The future of collaborative inquiry, on the Web or anywhere, is still a subject worth thinking about, but I don't see Wikipedia being anything but an obstacle to that.

Jon Awbrey

Hey and it only took you 10,000 posts.

Now, don't be so sarcastic. For one thing, it was more like 8,500 posts, and I suspect he knew it all along, but didn't want to seem overly didactic, much less needlessly dismissive.

You, on the other hand...

Considering what the thread title (currently) is, "Forum Objectives: The Long View," I suspect Mr. Awbrey here is trying to suggest in a somewhat subtle way that WR, and perhaps this subforum specifically, should be more focused on alternatives to Wikipedia and how such alternatives should be constructed and promoted, as opposed to trying to save something that's irredeemable, despite still being popular with the Google-fed masses.

Then again, I've misread him before, I suppose.

I think it's more of a cry for help. Like, now what? It should probably be in Support Group.

Mostly I'm just coming up on my 3rd anniversary here, and that leads to retro-intro-spection on what I'm doing here and what it might be worth doing here in the future, if anything.

Wikipedia its ownself is not really an interesting subject anymore — to me or any of the relatively normal people I know in real life — and listening to the Coterie Of Dope Opera Fans that hang out here is far less amusing than it used to be.

There are some issues about the future of collaborative inquiry that are still worth pursuing, but trying to develop a dialogue about that here is like the proverbial roller-skating in a buffalo herd, so maybe this won't be the place for it.

So I'll just continue to continue mulling it over fora while longer …

Jon Awbrey