Wikipedia Is Run By Morons and Here's Why

SYS-CON Media (press release)

Why do I say this? Obviously I've just had yet another bad experience with the self-professed Gods who “manage” the encyclopaedia. ...

View the article

This guy is VERY fired up. I like it.

Note, the actual original post, with scores of comments is found here.

Not so much for making coherent points, though. A lot of proof by assertion there.

Yeah, I lost him at "Wikipedia Is Run By Morons and Here’s Why. Wikipedia moderators make Hitler look like a hobbyist."

Besides the normal reply "Godwin!", the second sentence seems to imply (1) Hitler was a moron, (2) the opposite of Moron is "hobbyist." All of these propositions seem to have problems.

This seems to be in "News Worth Discussing". I think someone must have made a mistake here.

tl:dr

And, once again, the pro-Wikipediots have to poo-pooh the on-the-mark reactions of a REAL PERSON who experiences Wikipedia the way it was intended to be -- as a revenge platform -- not realizing the whole "encyclopedia of human knowledge" thing is just a sham.

Can you cite the part of the post where he talks about it being used as a revenge platform? I somehow missed that. All I got was "Wikipedia moderators are power-hungry pseudo-Nazis, and I am very angry for some reason!"

I don't think any of One, Lara, or I has ever denied that Wikipedia is used as a revenge platform. But that doesn't mean that everybody who's angry at Wikipedia has a coherent point to make.

Sys-Con.. hah. there's a name that brings up some not-quite-so-fond memories.. especially of Maureen O'Gara, during the Groklaw issues.

As for the original press release, *yawn*

I'm lost by the first five words of the title, "Wikipedia Is Run By Morons". Since when has that been news?

That part's that news, or would be if it was true, is the first three words of that title.

It's incoherent rants like this that give Wikipedia criticism a bad name.

Gee, I had a few choice things to say about Sys-Con on my blog, months ago.

I'd rather not get caught up in the site that re-posted the original piece, and I'd almost rather you all just look at the Comments field of the original, and maybe you'll get an idea of the quantity of people that Wikipedia actually pisses off.

Why is that?

I hope this wasn't directed at me. I skimmed over it, as it really was tl;dr, and it just seemed to be typical hyperbolic ramblings from some nutjob that got tossed out early in his editing for spamming or something. I didn't actually notice where he detailed exactly why he was pissed, but I saw several references to WP:SPAM.

And, of course, considering I work almost exclusively with BLP, it would be sort of silly to say that I don't realize that WP is used as a revenge platform. I see it all the time. Not to mention, considering my commentary both here and on WP, one would be hardpressed to call me pro-Wikipeida. I'm just not completely anti-Wikipedia.

Indeed. There's ways to criticise, and there's ways not to. The title immediately gives away the lack of any credibility to this.

I don't even care if you want to use invective, hyperbole, and over-the-top comparisons, provided that, at the core, you have a point. I don't see this guy's.

The point is not so much his rant---it's all the pissed-off people who posted comments below it. And are still posting comments, EIGHT MONTHS after the original blog post.

(I was helpful, and posted a link to WR. Welcome them with open arms. )

I'm wondering if anyone here is going to possibly draw the conclusion that Wikipedia's culture of abuse drives many people to hurl invective back at that culture?

That's really all I was saying about this post and the comments that followed.

If you want to dismiss it, fine.

If you want to pick it apart and criticize it for not being pointed-enough invective, fine.

I found it instructive, so I'll shut up now.

I don't see what's so "incoherent" about this - it's basically the classic "visionary futurists vs. uncomprehending morons who think they're fighting spamming con-men" situation. I mean, WP already has articles on Software as a service (T-H-L-K-D) (SaaS), Infrastructure as a service (T-H-L-K-D), Everything as a service (T-H-L-K-D), and so on. People are certainly trying to sell "data as a service" (DaaS). So the question is, are the people on Wikipedia who are trying to squelch this material really qualified to say whether this is real or not?

Worst case, the WP'ers in question might be people who have a vested financial interest in preventing businesses from seeing DaaS as a viable alternative to existing SaaS solutions, or perhaps as an alternative to Haagen Dazs ice cream, which can be very fattening to say the least.

So you lost him at your being a fucking illiterate who reads a headline and subhead as two sentences which logically depend on each other.

Never mind the fact that you haven't checked the original that Mr. Kohs spoon-fed you and where the subhead doesn't occur. It's simply to fit the dotnet.sys-con house style and very possibly was not even the work of Mr. Williams, seeing as how in real media that stuff is done by the copy editor.

Careful you don't make Mr. Williams' point for him, Cool Hand Luke (T-C-L-K-R-D) !

Meanwhile, the song remains the same:

He won't have to - it looks like Mr. Williams has just registered as a WR member!

I wonder if we could offer "WR as a Service"? We've already got an RSS feed, so how hard could it be?

Hi folks

I wrote the blog post in question some time ago, but it's only just been syndicated.

It's not really meant to be news: just comment. I think a couple of points are made and they're made quite clearly; whether or not anyone chooses to agree is another matter. However, it has performed its main function admirably: to get people fired up and thinking. Deftly employing occupatio, I shall avoid using the term "link bait"...

(See how I helped some of you non-English majors out there? Now please don't go away and re-write the linked-to entry!)

Of course, "Wikipedia moderators make Hitler look like a hobbyist" is not a clause dependent on "Wikipedia Is Run By Morons and Here’s Why" anywhere in the original piece, which would be bizarre. I was in fact trying to point out that Wikipedia moderators are tenacious and zealous - making Hitler look like a hobbyist. It might be inflammatory but it does make sense!

However, saying this is all pretty redundant as someone's already made the point.

Welcome to WR. Some of us seem to like the cut of your jib.

Looking over the many comments on your post, one of the things that strikes me is that people outside of the wikibubble are not only exasperated at wikipedia, they seem to be grasping some of the nature of wikipedia's procedural and linguistic perversions (the remaking of the word "vandalism", for example). You've struck a nerve, and it will be par for the wikipediot course that a malicious and irrational character will be created to represent you in WP mythology.

(I also like the guy posting on Jan 2: "I hate Wikipedia and I think it should burn.")

Actually, the first sentence you quote is the title of the article, and the second sentence is a selected sentence from within it.

That is, it is not an argument, just two separate sentences.

If you check other articles at the website, you'll see the pattern.

The phenomenon of "an eye for an eye" is hardly a feature unique to Wikipedia.

Call it what you will — mimesis, revenge, recursion, cancer, hell — answering an abusive blow with an equal and opposite blow is a legendary characteristic of foolish characters in both political history and storybook legend.

Beyond mindlessly answering a punch with a counterpunch is the academic alternative of analyzing and diagnosing the inherent systemic dysfunctionality of recursive combat. That inherent systemic dysfunctionality is, by now, well-documented, both in the particular case of WikiCulture and in the general case of humankind's bloody record of political history.

The perennially unsolved problem is illuminating that futile tragedy to those who do not yet grasp it. Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to writing the perfect comic opera to lampoon the cartoonish slugfest in the most effective and entertaining manner.

So far, no one has crafted such a masterpiece sufficient to educate the majority of the denizens of WikiCulture.

"self-professed Gods who “manage” the encyclopaedia."

Um, wikipedia admins neither call themselves "Gods" nor call what they do "managing", as far as I am aware. Both of those terms (along with "moderators") are terms the article writer made up.

His "wikipedia messages" don't look like actual article boxes (though they at least seem to use the right icons)

The "thecloud.svg" image doesn't appear to be used anywhere but the logo on the cloud computing navbox, a context in which it can hardly be said to be anyone's attempt at a 'diagram'.

Posts from other thread moved here. If the wikipediots are going to attempt to discredit the author, might as well have it in the thread predicting that behaviour.

Oh.. Well, that explains it. It WAS the article from Oct 08. I thought this was new news? Why is it being regurgitated?

It reminds me of an old school WR rant circa Blissy and company. It basically says: 1) They were mean to me, and; 2) I don't like mean people. Next comes they don't play fair and I don't think this is really what it seems. As time gives perspective the mean people become less important nor even interesting and focus shifts to how Wikipedia harms innocent people and the culture. Bit by bit this builds into a coherent critique.

I was not impressed by the piece at all.
Also, it appears to have been written in October 2008, so I'm not sure why there are threads popping up on it now.

This is explained above... a couple times, I think. Including by the author, who registered an account with us.

Okay. Wake me up when that happens.

Hey, ya snooze, ya lose, pal!

Basically, the issue is probably something along these lines. Any programmer can tell you that a "web service" is basically a process that runs on a web server, and in most cases exposes one or more datasets to the outside in a controlled fashion - i.e., it's a kind of broker which responds to specifically-formatted requests from a client or consumer process - which could be just a web browser, but is most likely a customized app of some kind. The response is usually in the form of an XML stream, which is then presented in some sort of useful way to the person running the client app.

This is different from, say, an ordinary server-side web app that displays data as HTML pages, or from fully exposing a database server to actual SQL queries (the latter being something that nobody would ever do, of course).

So the question then becomes, how is "Data as a Service" different from simply writing one of these web services and exposing data though it? Is there an additional aspect or factor involved that sets it apart from what amounts to fairly straightforward querying and programming?

Presumably the WP'ers involved in this case didn't think there was, or there would be an article about it, right?

If this has already been covered, then I apologize for duplicating.

The blog author is Wikipedia user JamesLWilliams2010 (T-C-L-K-R-D) . In September 2008 he created the articles Postcode Anywhere and Data as a service. "Postcode Anywhere" had been created twice before, all three times it was speedy deleted as advertising. The version written by Mr. Williams had only one external reliable source (newspaper article) which was embedded in the sentence, "Postcode Anywhere continues to receive positive local press [5] but has yet to receive more mainstream recognition, despite its market penetration and numerous awards."

The article on "Data as a service" had one external reference (this, to be exact) and several references to thewebservice.com and mrwebservice.wordpress.com, which are Mr. Williams' company and blog.

Mr. Williams also attempted to post his diagram of data as a service to several articles (such as this), the image was removed by User:SamJohnston, who is not an administrator. Sam nominated the image for deletion saying "Original research created by user with blatant conflict of interest in data as a service and belligerantly spammed across various articles, with removal attempts reverted", Mr. Williams' only reply was "no it's not", after which he blanked his talk page and stopped editing.

I leave it to the spectators to decide whether Mr. Williams was the wronged party.

(Note, since Mr. Williams posted the contents of his two deleted articles in the comments section of his original blog post in October, I don't think I'm crossing any lines by discussing the deleted articles here.)

Yay! It confirmed my interpretation of the situation, which I gathered without actually having to read the article! Good times.

So this is a case of someone who realized that Wikipedia is for promoting your own commercial products, but failed to take the time to learn the proper way to go about using it for that purpose!

Wikipedia is full of great little traps like that. Someone really should write a book on how to use Wikipedia for commercial promotion (and a companion on how to use Wikipedia for issue advocacy). Bonus points if you can get an article on Wikipedia about the book.

Kelly, damn you. I may have to take up this particular challenge.

In that case, triple bonus points if they write an article about you called Kohsher controversy, which would certainly not be a biography, but an article about you were banned, unbanned, then re-banned after writing said book.

Ah, Kohs getting banned for writing a book. That would make for interesting press.

Postcode Anywhere is basically a software product/service like zillions of others, and I can see how WP would reject an article about it, but I don't believe anyone here has disproven the notion that "Data as a Service" could be something substantially more than simply using web services to disseminate the contents on databases. Nor would I say that a person in Williams' position should be blamed for trying - often one's success in these sorts of things seems to be a matter of almost pure luck, so why not?

Nevertheless, I'd have to say that a book on how to "get away with it" on Wikipedia wouldn't be a bad idea. The book would have to be full of disclaimers regarding the whole luck thing, but as long as it's clear that you're instructing people in how to put themselves into position to take advantage of that luck, you could probably get some decent sales out of it. Unfortunately, you'd probably have to avoid any really strident anti-WP sentiments (i.e., "WP must be destroyed," etc.) in order to have it be taken seriously by the MSM, and by extension the SEO community, which IMO would be the source of most of the attention you'd be getting.

Some off-topic stuff split to the Lounge.

Don't forget to get paid for it. Vanity press not allowed--
because some Wiki-dicki will claim it's not a valid source for
an article.

Well, the way I look at it, the company I work for isn't like zillions of other purely self-promoting dullards in that it is multi-award winning, bagging trophies at prestigious events like the National Business Awards. In this respect it's worthy of a mention. It might not be Microsoft but where do you draw the line? What's interesting is that Wikipedians' shackles go up immediately they see what they consider to be a "vested interest" - the trouble is, who's ever going to be arsed to write it in the first place? Is the rule "Unless a third party can be bothered to take hours out of their day writing the article and finding all the references to the facts, you're not important enough"? I'm not sure that's the best course of action. Just seems to me like it's a game people are playing. Well done, you've got the ability to take a valid article down about an award-winning company and be able to justify it. To me that seems, really, like a bit of a hollow victory. Besides, I work in PR... you can't blame me for trying. (Before I joined the company a couple of spammy attempts had been made to get an entry on Wikipedia but I believe my attempt was pretty on the level.)

As for the data-as-a-service article, well hell, I only know about it because the company I work for specialises in it. I've written a lot of material on the subject. I linked to my own blog and the company because that's what I know. I wouldn't have started, say, an edit war if anyone found better resources and linked out to them. At the time it was unlikely (and still is).

I think Wikipedians should stop questioning motives and personalising issues. It's becoming quite a snake pit. Ultimately data-as-a-service is a genuine, bona fide concept and it's in common parlance. I get Google alerts for it popping in my inbox every day. To wipe it off Wikipedia is silly. In fact the guy who got it speedily removed contacted my workplace to try and get me fired for disagreeing with him on the discussion pages. To me that's more than a bit below the belt.

My observations are confirmed time and time again. I was idly correcting some spelling mistakes on Wikipedia the other night to find within a few hours they'd all been reverted. (I hadn't logged in so I guess revisions from random IP addresses get treated with more suspicion... or rather, they just get blindly reverted without anyone bothering to read the changes. In fact, there is a *remarkable* arrogance and delight in not actually reading stuff, and just dismissing it out of turn: "TL-DR, but I'll pass judgment anyway." That behaviour is not clever. It's damn lame and it's ignorant.)

I know there are some great people working on Wikipedia but there also are plenty of jerks who just want to wield the Awesome Power of The Admin. Mostly it's like politics, isn't it? Those who want the power are the least able to wield it...

You can deride me, call me a nutjob, say I have vested interests (possibly without even reading what I have to say), but that's lame and waaaay too easy; ultimately there's a lot going on here that people need to wake up to.

Hey! You could tell us more.....did the twit leave any personal information?


Sad to say, there are very few people here who would not dream of calling you a nutjob--
because so many of them have received similar treatment. Sometimes worse.

If you look at James' talk page history, and the AFD for Postcode Anywhere it must be SamJohnston (T-C-L-K-R-D) .

Edit: He also has his own page at Sys-Con.
https://samjohnston.sys-con.com/

Right, but is it really just a convenient term to describe the programming and/or hosting of web-service apps that provide/broker/expose data...? Or is there more to it than that?


Also, somebody has to tell that Johnston dude that it's spelled "protologism," not "protoglism." The latter would be, ironically, a protologism itself...

Whatever you think about his articles, this banner is pure comic gold.

http://mrwebservice.files.wordpress.com/20...a_message_2.gif

If anyone's interested, the dude who provoked the original blog post has just responded here.

On a related note, he's recently penned an article on a so-called "intercloud."

Remember that the data-as-a-service was purportedly deleted because it was judged to be a "neologism." Now in light of this, it *totally* smacks of hypocrisy at best, and at worst, vested interests to promote some terms and bury others... that's Wikipedia!

You seem to be mistakenly in the "People Worth Living" category.