Friday, March 23, 2018

The State of Play: Pushing through Torpid Seas of Molasses

So where are we? Wikipediocracy's last blog post was two weeks from Christmas, 2017. Meanwhile I've cranked out six posts in the three months, but I can get away with that because this blog goes outside of WikiLand, and it has to, because not a lot is happening inside Wikipedia. The one page that gets the most use by me is the pointless Wikimedia "global ban list", because James "Buffet Master" Alexander has been throwing editors out at an irregular rate of one or two almost every month since Spring of 2017, which means that whomever is still editing Wikipedia is living in fear of being thrown out for sockpuppeting or being annoying to the shrinking number of Big Wheels involved with The Project, even though it seems like most of the active editors are sockpuppeting (much like how Citizen's Band operators are using illegal "export model" radios and talking to each other in narrowband FM mode using fifty watts of power* - the illegal/banned modes or methods have become the norm because policing is half-assed.)

The real problem within Wikipeda-criticism is that you have to either never have been a member (like yours truly) or you don't want back in for the criticism to be serious. It was made quite clear that Wikipediocracy is unwilling to aim at real criticism when William "Monty" Burns was in the group photo of Wikiconference USA 2016, front row far right. And it's getting harder even if you are serious in your criticism of Jimbo Wales' zoo because Wikipedia is slowing down faster and faster from editor loss, indiscriminate 'bot use, and idiotic unwillingness to let experts (especially biologists) come in and fill all those red columns of obscure viruses, or just hire a squad of copyeditors to rework numerous articles into readability. None of that will happen - it will all just slowly stop and lock down and the 'bots will be running around to stop article vandalism from script kiddies who will be using Wikipedia as a testing ground to leave "markers" behind after they break into the locked site. And the entropy comes back around to this very blog, because we will be stuck writing about Wikipedia as history due to all the material we have on the place. I can do that for a while, but sooner or later people will stop looking at this blog (even though our most looked-at post is the one on Jon Schillaci, Wikipedia's fleeing child molester.) We are just riding the wave until the board hits the beach.

If you are interested in Russia, check out The Russian Reader and Sean's Russia Blog. The former is more "life on the streets" the latter is now mostly a site to link together Sean Guillory's interviews with academics on Russian and Soviet history, Russian culture, etc. Don't mention Guillory to the St. Petersberger who runs TRR; it's just easier if you don't.


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* American legal CB is four watts and AM or Single-Side Band (Upper or Lower) mode; all CB is channelized, with the US doing forty channels and some other countries (Germany) doing up to eighty channels. FM is for Europe and Asia; Australia and some other Asian states use a small chunk of the UHF business radio band for CB. The FCC stuck it at four watts (with a ten to twelve watt "swing" depending on how loud the operator is talking) because eleven meters is one of those frequency bands that can occasionally "skip" thanks to tropospheric ducting and you can be heard hundreds to thousands of miles away. The "export" transceivers used to be fifteen to twenty watts but the output transistors can now easily run fifty watts, negating the need for a low-end linear amplifier. Such an amplifier can blast out anywhere from twenty to a thousand watts, depending on how big a check the CB'er cuts to the radio store clerk the day the amplifier is bought.

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