The following schematic of argument has been abstracted from the actual case files of the English Wikipedia.

Only the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.





Just the fats, ma'am ...

Jonny

What a complete penis.

I have to admit, having a rule called "Don't be a penis" is waaay funnier than "Don't be a dick." Besides, "Dick" can also be a person's name...

In some ways, this "Samboner" guy actually has a point. The trend is clearly towards the word "dick" becoming more accepted in the vernacular than "penis," with the latter term increasingly being treated as more vulgar than the former. It might not have reached the point yet where they really should move the article (and after all, that's what redirects are for), but nevertheless it's an interesting phenomenon.

Really, I don't try to be obfuschiate ... some things just turn out that way. By way of explaining the intended moral of my little teledrama -- "based on a true story" -- let me just provide the following clarification. Among the names that I changed to protect the ignorant were the names for which I substituted "Dick", "Penis", and "Samboner". The original discussion had to do with a wholly different set of technical terms, torn from a field quite apart from anatomy, but apart from that I did preserve both the logical structure and the pedagogical absurdity of the original suggestion.

And yet this miscuing does raise the question of what the Holy Orders of the Wikipedia Reformation should be. With all due humility, I think that our rubric should go a bit like this:

• Be Lion-Hearted !!!
• But Don't Be A Richard III ...

Jonny

Okay, the Catiline is out of the bag. Protecting the ignorant is not really my job -- if that's what you want, you know where to find your unfriendly nooborhood Ignorance Protection Service.

But I did not want to be accused of e-lecture-neering while the vote of wikipeers was still in progress, so I disguised the terms of the debate a bit.

The subject of the above lampoon is really the Wikipedia article on Exclusive Disjunction, whose name was recently changed to Exclusive Or on the instigation of a user who prefaces his plea with the following admission:


Let me tell you something about real life. In real life they have these things called Books, and they have these places called Schools and Universities, where people called Teachers conduct these activities called Courses, and all of these things, if you know how to avail yourself of them, can be great resources for learning all sorts of things, if you have the slightest hankering for learning.

In real life, a person who says, "I have never heard the phrase "Exclusive Disjunction"", has instantly identified himself as a person who has yet to assimilate the contents of the most elementary textbook on logic, nor has yet managed to enroll, pass, or remain conscious throughout a beginning course on the subject. A person like that needs to be reading articles on logical subjects, for sure, but has confessed himself innocent of the competence to determine their content or their placement within the larger subject matter of logic.

Jonny

... I so wish I had a pistol right now. *sigh*

Don't forget the silver bullets ...

Jonny

Again, a single bean does not make a hill of beans, but the pattern of so-called argument that one finds in this situation is absolutely typical of the real content-determining process at Wikipedia. It was one of the first peculiarities that I noticed about the place, namely, how many so-called judgments I lost to people who began their cases by saying something like "I don't know anything about this, but ..." !!!

The other thing that you will notice in case after case of this kind is that most of the WikiWafflers embroiled in the dispute have not even bothered to read the associated complex of articles. For example, several people in the ensuing debate are arguing that the term "exclusive or" is prevalent in computer science, or some of its applied subcontexts. But the computer science folks already have a separate article on the hardware XOR gate, and the logic and math folks are always happy to let them have their own turf when it comes to that. In fact, it's very often the case in matters of logic that you'll have distinct articles for the math POV, the philosophy POV, and the computer science POV. Shhhh, don't tell anybody, some bluddy mergist may be listening, and the next thing you know we'll have a civil war that makes that Unpleasant Business with the American Clonies look like a tea party.

But while we wait for the next surge of wasted ediocy, we might entertain ourselves by examining the ever more wikipopular Argumentum Ad Googlium.

For example, one word I can never remember how to spell is that word for "body art". Being too lazy to reach for a dictionary the other day, I googled on the most likely spellings and got this:

• Tatoo : 7,040,000 hits.
• Tattoo : 2,780,000 hits.

Thankfully, someone at Google put the correct spelling in, so the first try also yields the helpful prompt "Did you mean Tattoo?" If only they had some helpful prompters at Wikipedia. Just from my personal experience, I'm guessing they've all been banned.

Jonny

http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/?view=uk

http://m-w.com/

Hit Parade : Exact Phrase Search on "Exclusive Or"

1. Should I Be Exclusive or Non-Exclusive?
2. Exclusive or Shared Competence in the Common Commercial Policy
3. Exclusive- or Preferential-Use Lanes for High Occupancy Vehicles
4. Exclusive Or -- from Wolfram MathWorld. Redirects to XOR, which has "exclusive or" in scare quotes, then links to Exclusive Disjunction.
5. Of course, this posting, yes, this very one, whether you nofollow me or not, adds N hits for "exclusive or", now N+1, and only 1 for "exclusive disjunction", now 2. That's a local consensus of N+1 to 2 in favor of "exclusive or", now N+2 to 2. See how that works? It's like the overweenied Hydra of Geek Mythology. The more you castigate it, the more weenies it grows.
6. The Hits Just Keep On Coming ...

Jonny