Another guest post from the Man in the TARDIS, Doctor Why.
Ever heard of "Operation Swill"? Happened in May 2013, and was widely reported, yet today it's barely remembered. One would swear there was no such bust.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/05/23/operation_swill_new_jersey_six_ways_to_tell_if_your_bar_is_selling_mislabeled.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/operation-swill_n_3322009.html
Note this part: "Twenty-nine bars and restaurants, nearly half of them TGI Fridays", okay? Ya got that? One of America's biggest restaurant chains was involved, at multiple franchise locations in New Jersey. Something about putting rubbing alcohol in liquor bottles and serving it to patrons, disgustingly enough.
Now, go to the TGI Friday's article on Wikipedia. Nothing. Not even a "Controversies" or an "Issues" section. Nothing bad ever, ever happens at or around TGI Friday's, according to Wikipedia.
Look at the history of the article, it shows the common signs of carefully concealed paid editing. Numerous small changes by a mess of IPs and minor accounts that do an assortment of things. More obvious is the presence of that notorious Burger King employee, Jerem43. He's been "watching" this article quite a bit, until recently.
Here's the thing: last May, someone tried to insert a paragraph about "Operation Swill", a fact which would embarrass any restaurant chain mightly. Other editors expanded it. But it only lasted a month, because Jerem43 smugly removed it, snarling "Remove section that concerns TGI Friday's franchisees, it is not about the corporate entity known as Fridays."
Jerem43 also removed a section about a number of Friday's locations being closed due to the 2008 recession. "Remove section relating to defunct franchise in one city - unrealted to the company as a whole." (sic)
So, this is one of the "clever" things about business franchising. If a franchisee feeds his customers rubbing alcohol and "dirty water" and calls it "top-shelf liquor brands", well, hell, that's not the fault of the brandname owner. Not only that, they'll get their paid editor to remove any such scurrilous information from Wikipedia.
Which, to this day, does not mention "Operation Swill" anywhere. The head of the New Jersey Alcohol Board of Control, Mike Halfacre, had a Wikipedia biography. Which was put up for deletion two months after Operation Swill, by "I am One of Many", a "spamfighter" who likes to report usernames as "spamusernames". Media coverage of Operation Swill was mentioned as one reason to keep it, and it was kept. Yet even Halfacre's biography today doesn't mention Operation Swill, one of his biggest career successes. Why?
And as of November 2014, Jerem43 is still carefully manicuring "History of Burger King", in spite of his user page being prominently tagged "I am going back to school after 25 years. I will be editing Wikipedia a bit less. I am checking up daily, but cannot devote a lot of time to it." Guess the money's worth neglecting schoolwork. What other restaurant chains is he "serving"? His edit summary mentions hundreds of edits to "List of McDonald's products", "KFC", and "Wendy's", in addition to his thousands of edits to Burger King articles, so he must be a full-service editor for the fast food industry.
As if anyone cares, mind you. And so far as we can see, no one does. Enjoy your whiskey sour.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Thursday, November 6, 2014
A Guest Post on Jimmy Wales
Below is a work of raging genius from a man who may (or may not) have his own TARDIS.
Wales Speaks, And We Laugh (but not because he's a great comedian)
by Doctor Why
As long as we're discussing the degeneration of Wikipedia and its Holy Man, we might as well parse the closing speech he gave at the 2014 Wikimania. Because it's classic Jimmy. He's a shitty speech-giver, which only makes his desirability as a public speaker all the more baffling.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales_Speaks_at_Closing_Ceremony_of_Wikimania_2014
1: "This is my annual traditional talk and one of the things I traditionally do in my annual traditional talk is get everyone to stand up and say how many Wikimanias you've been to, but we did that in the opening ceremony, so I'm just going to get right down to talking about what I wanted to say this year."
That's how he started it. Amateurish, stupid, an attempt at humor that falls flat. (You may have noticed by now that Objectivists have no detectable sense of humor, and Jimmy fits the profile.)
2: "So, first of all, in a "State of the Wiki" address, one of the things I've done in the past is to talk about statistics -- statistics about how we're doing -- how many articles and how many languages and so forth like that.
But this year I just didn't want to to do that. You all know those numbers as well as I do or even better."
No, they don't. The few statistics the WMF publishes are either trivial things like page views, or declining things like active editors and active administrators. If a corporation turned in performance figures like those seen in the WMF's 2014 report, the CEO (presumably Jimmy) would be tossed unceremoniously out the door.
3: "Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail.
[laughter]
I was really heartened to see -- I was actually happy to see -- how little the public trusts them as the rest.
But I mean the thing that's really impressive here is the BBC has an excellent reputation as an excellent news source, and we're trusted slightly more than the BBC. Now, that's a little scary --
[laughter]"
There's some more of what Wales passes off as "humor". It's not funny when you realize that millions of Britons take the crap published in the Sun and the Daily Mail with deadly seriousness. The UK grows increasingly racist, isolationist, paranoid, and inequitable, and the UK media has a major role. But Wales The Golden Boy makes jokes about it. And his shithead followers laugh on cue. Might as well be a speech by Stalin, with cued applause.
4: "-- and probably inappropriate, but it is something that we have accomplished and I think that it's really important, and I think that all of the things that we think about, everything that we do at Wikimania, all over when we're talking about the software, we're talking about the community, we're thinking about all of the nitty-gritty of our work, the one thing that we should always remember is that we are here for these people (not just the British ones) but for the readers, for the general public."
Aw shucks, he's just like us, ain't he Martha? Just reg'lar folk! Cain't talk for shit or nothin'! Ain't nothin' fancy about his plain speakin'! Don't make no sense neither!
5: "When you scrolled further down in this news story, they also inquired about another source which was left off, which was Encyclopedia Britannica. And people trusted Encyclopedia Britannica -- I forget the exact number, but it was like 20 points ahead of us -- it might have been 89 percent or 84 percent -- well you can look it up. So, that's fine, Encyclopedia Britannica is quite good, but it does tell that we still have -- that we're not finished. I'm not going to rest until people tell us that they trust us more than they ever trusted Encyclopedia Britannica in the past. And for that to happen we really need to do everything right, we've got a lot of things we have to get right in order to achieve that goal."
Pointless to even bring up, asshole. You've won the war and killed Britannica, by delivering what idiot high-school students want: general reference information, available online at all times, of questionable value, at an impossibly low price. You are the Wal-Mart of information, Jimmy. You suck, you know you suck, and yet you keep lying about your suckage, in public. And people still give you money.
6: "And one of the things we always talk about is civility. But this has long been a contentious issue in the community and I have, I hope, a new approach to thinking about this that I'm hoping to popularize today, because I think that in many ways our conversations about civility in the community have gone down a bad path that is causing us to miss an enormous opportunity."
BULL FUCKING SHIT. You, sir, installed complete assholes like Erik Moeller and "The Cunctator" in charge of your project, long ago. And they installed even worse people, like Angela Beesley, Phil Sandifer, Mark "Monsterass" Pellegrini, and that horrifying amphetamine-gobbling cunt "Slim Virgin". These freaks were some of the most incivil, hateful, abusive "leaders" you could possibly find, and THEY made your "incivility problem" into an established subculture. You can blame no one but yourself for the "bad path", Mr. Wales. So shoot yourself.
7: "One of the classic problems we have is -- and we have this a lot in English Wikipedia -- is the annoying user, who at least allegedly produces good content. There are users in the community who have a reputation for creating good content, and for being incredibly toxic personalities. This is a tough issue because [fixes slide problem] but my idea is very simple. Actually, on this issue, I have a very simple view is that most of these editors actually cost us more than they're actually worth, and we're making a big mistake by tolerating people who are causing us enormous --
[prolonged applause]"
Just say it, fucknuts. You want to get rid of people who write your content, like Giano and Eric "Malleus" Corbett. Because they won't kiss your arrogant fucking asses. Right? Admit it. You'd rather kill the encyclopedia off than give an inch to the people who wrote it.
8: "Apparently I'm fulfilling my role as the symbolic monarch of just speaking the thoughts that have bubbled up through the community."
You are NOT a "monarch", Mr. Wales. You are a little shit with a battered copy of ATLAS SHRUGGED who stumbled into creating a major website. That's all you are. You haven't saved a million lives, you haven't even saved a few kittens at the local animal shelter. All you've really done is made it easier for lazy teenagers to plagiarize term papers. Oh, yeah, that makes you a regular Albert Schweitzer.
9: "The truth is, we're human beings, we're a human community, and there's always going to be some strife, there's always going to be some debates that get out of hand, and things like that.
But I think that we can capture a spirit, the spirit that you feel here at Wikimania, a really positive spirit."
Ask some of the people your "community" is defaming right now, Jimmy. Ask Rupert Sheldrake or Brian Josephson or John Lott. Or your "old friend" Rachel Marsden. If it's such a "positive spirit", where's the Damon Dash biography? And how's that Yank Barry business coming along? How many other Qwortys and Johann Haris are running around on your little project right now? You don't even know, do you?
Oh, of course you won't discuss any of that, Jimmy. Because you're a liar and a coward, running herd on a website full of lying cowardly bullies.
Ah hell, that's enough. He just goes on and on, spewing the Crap They Want To Hear. Criticizing Mr. Wales for his folksy banter and moronic jokes does not change the opinion his idiot fan following has of him; or of Wikipedia. He could shit on the podium and wiggle his little penis at the crowd, and they'd still love him. He's like the creator of "My Little Pony" at one of those horrible "Brony" conventions. His fans are so insane and so blinded, what he says or does is not even meaningful anymore.
Would you buy a used online "encyclopedia" from this man?
Wales Speaks, And We Laugh (but not because he's a great comedian)
by Doctor Why
As long as we're discussing the degeneration of Wikipedia and its Holy Man, we might as well parse the closing speech he gave at the 2014 Wikimania. Because it's classic Jimmy. He's a shitty speech-giver, which only makes his desirability as a public speaker all the more baffling.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales_Speaks_at_Closing_Ceremony_of_Wikimania_2014
1: "This is my annual traditional talk and one of the things I traditionally do in my annual traditional talk is get everyone to stand up and say how many Wikimanias you've been to, but we did that in the opening ceremony, so I'm just going to get right down to talking about what I wanted to say this year."
That's how he started it. Amateurish, stupid, an attempt at humor that falls flat. (You may have noticed by now that Objectivists have no detectable sense of humor, and Jimmy fits the profile.)
2: "So, first of all, in a "State of the Wiki" address, one of the things I've done in the past is to talk about statistics -- statistics about how we're doing -- how many articles and how many languages and so forth like that.
But this year I just didn't want to to do that. You all know those numbers as well as I do or even better."
No, they don't. The few statistics the WMF publishes are either trivial things like page views, or declining things like active editors and active administrators. If a corporation turned in performance figures like those seen in the WMF's 2014 report, the CEO (presumably Jimmy) would be tossed unceremoniously out the door.
3: "Now, the UK is home to a very diverse newspaper community, a vibrant newspaper culture. We've got papers like The Sun, The Mirror, The Mail.
[laughter]
I was really heartened to see -- I was actually happy to see -- how little the public trusts them as the rest.
But I mean the thing that's really impressive here is the BBC has an excellent reputation as an excellent news source, and we're trusted slightly more than the BBC. Now, that's a little scary --
[laughter]"
There's some more of what Wales passes off as "humor". It's not funny when you realize that millions of Britons take the crap published in the Sun and the Daily Mail with deadly seriousness. The UK grows increasingly racist, isolationist, paranoid, and inequitable, and the UK media has a major role. But Wales The Golden Boy makes jokes about it. And his shithead followers laugh on cue. Might as well be a speech by Stalin, with cued applause.
4: "-- and probably inappropriate, but it is something that we have accomplished and I think that it's really important, and I think that all of the things that we think about, everything that we do at Wikimania, all over when we're talking about the software, we're talking about the community, we're thinking about all of the nitty-gritty of our work, the one thing that we should always remember is that we are here for these people (not just the British ones) but for the readers, for the general public."
Aw shucks, he's just like us, ain't he Martha? Just reg'lar folk! Cain't talk for shit or nothin'! Ain't nothin' fancy about his plain speakin'! Don't make no sense neither!
5: "When you scrolled further down in this news story, they also inquired about another source which was left off, which was Encyclopedia Britannica. And people trusted Encyclopedia Britannica -- I forget the exact number, but it was like 20 points ahead of us -- it might have been 89 percent or 84 percent -- well you can look it up. So, that's fine, Encyclopedia Britannica is quite good, but it does tell that we still have -- that we're not finished. I'm not going to rest until people tell us that they trust us more than they ever trusted Encyclopedia Britannica in the past. And for that to happen we really need to do everything right, we've got a lot of things we have to get right in order to achieve that goal."
Pointless to even bring up, asshole. You've won the war and killed Britannica, by delivering what idiot high-school students want: general reference information, available online at all times, of questionable value, at an impossibly low price. You are the Wal-Mart of information, Jimmy. You suck, you know you suck, and yet you keep lying about your suckage, in public. And people still give you money.
6: "And one of the things we always talk about is civility. But this has long been a contentious issue in the community and I have, I hope, a new approach to thinking about this that I'm hoping to popularize today, because I think that in many ways our conversations about civility in the community have gone down a bad path that is causing us to miss an enormous opportunity."
BULL FUCKING SHIT. You, sir, installed complete assholes like Erik Moeller and "The Cunctator" in charge of your project, long ago. And they installed even worse people, like Angela Beesley, Phil Sandifer, Mark "Monsterass" Pellegrini, and that horrifying amphetamine-gobbling cunt "Slim Virgin". These freaks were some of the most incivil, hateful, abusive "leaders" you could possibly find, and THEY made your "incivility problem" into an established subculture. You can blame no one but yourself for the "bad path", Mr. Wales. So shoot yourself.
7: "One of the classic problems we have is -- and we have this a lot in English Wikipedia -- is the annoying user, who at least allegedly produces good content. There are users in the community who have a reputation for creating good content, and for being incredibly toxic personalities. This is a tough issue because [fixes slide problem] but my idea is very simple. Actually, on this issue, I have a very simple view is that most of these editors actually cost us more than they're actually worth, and we're making a big mistake by tolerating people who are causing us enormous --
[prolonged applause]"
Just say it, fucknuts. You want to get rid of people who write your content, like Giano and Eric "Malleus" Corbett. Because they won't kiss your arrogant fucking asses. Right? Admit it. You'd rather kill the encyclopedia off than give an inch to the people who wrote it.
8: "Apparently I'm fulfilling my role as the symbolic monarch of just speaking the thoughts that have bubbled up through the community."
You are NOT a "monarch", Mr. Wales. You are a little shit with a battered copy of ATLAS SHRUGGED who stumbled into creating a major website. That's all you are. You haven't saved a million lives, you haven't even saved a few kittens at the local animal shelter. All you've really done is made it easier for lazy teenagers to plagiarize term papers. Oh, yeah, that makes you a regular Albert Schweitzer.
9: "The truth is, we're human beings, we're a human community, and there's always going to be some strife, there's always going to be some debates that get out of hand, and things like that.
But I think that we can capture a spirit, the spirit that you feel here at Wikimania, a really positive spirit."
Ask some of the people your "community" is defaming right now, Jimmy. Ask Rupert Sheldrake or Brian Josephson or John Lott. Or your "old friend" Rachel Marsden. If it's such a "positive spirit", where's the Damon Dash biography? And how's that Yank Barry business coming along? How many other Qwortys and Johann Haris are running around on your little project right now? You don't even know, do you?
Oh, of course you won't discuss any of that, Jimmy. Because you're a liar and a coward, running herd on a website full of lying cowardly bullies.
Ah hell, that's enough. He just goes on and on, spewing the Crap They Want To Hear. Criticizing Mr. Wales for his folksy banter and moronic jokes does not change the opinion his idiot fan following has of him; or of Wikipedia. He could shit on the podium and wiggle his little penis at the crowd, and they'd still love him. He's like the creator of "My Little Pony" at one of those horrible "Brony" conventions. His fans are so insane and so blinded, what he says or does is not even meaningful anymore.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Addendum to the last post...
Some things I forgot to tack on:
Deleting stuff. Just like with creating unpersons, you can't completely obliterate information. Somebody somewhere has a html copy of some blog you thought you deleted in 2000 just because your description of GAZ 21 Volga cars gives him a weird erection. I've seen it time and again where the information on a website was scraped from another, closed, website which may itself have come from another dead page. Now that you can do screenshots instead of printing it off and then typing it up, the image of whatever catches the collector's fancy is there in his/her hard drive. The way we deal with much information on the web is now like a mosaic, and what was on certain missing pieces can be inferred by references to the missing bits on the surviving components. Jimmy Wales has tried this a lot on his Wikipedia talk-page, burying the times he's stuck his leg into his mouth, but the sheer act of repeated deletion means people will be there taking "before" and "after" screenshots just for laughs.
Wiki-communism. There is a lot of back-and-forth about how Wikipedia is the second coming of Communism because it's a collective organization, with a hierarchy, and lots of rules, and a "beloved"leader-figure....and I have to laugh, because those terms could also describe the American Continental and Militia forces during the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence if you are British.) Like the Wikipedists, the soldiers and sailors weren't paid either. Jimbo Wales is not a Marxist; from everything I've read, he is a hard-core fan of Ayn Rand. He wanted ads on Wikipedia and that created the friction between Wales and Larry Sanger (the only guy with a Ph.D [as far as I know] at Bomis, Wales' original company.) In truth, if Wales could charge for different levels of information at Wikipedia, he probably would.....which is why he has tried to capitalize on his leadership/creatorship of Wikipedia in as many ads as possible.
(You knew the reference above had to appear.)
Deleting stuff. Just like with creating unpersons, you can't completely obliterate information. Somebody somewhere has a html copy of some blog you thought you deleted in 2000 just because your description of GAZ 21 Volga cars gives him a weird erection. I've seen it time and again where the information on a website was scraped from another, closed, website which may itself have come from another dead page. Now that you can do screenshots instead of printing it off and then typing it up, the image of whatever catches the collector's fancy is there in his/her hard drive. The way we deal with much information on the web is now like a mosaic, and what was on certain missing pieces can be inferred by references to the missing bits on the surviving components. Jimmy Wales has tried this a lot on his Wikipedia talk-page, burying the times he's stuck his leg into his mouth, but the sheer act of repeated deletion means people will be there taking "before" and "after" screenshots just for laughs.
Wiki-communism. There is a lot of back-and-forth about how Wikipedia is the second coming of Communism because it's a collective organization, with a hierarchy, and lots of rules, and a "beloved"leader-figure....and I have to laugh, because those terms could also describe the American Continental and Militia forces during the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence if you are British.) Like the Wikipedists, the soldiers and sailors weren't paid either. Jimbo Wales is not a Marxist; from everything I've read, he is a hard-core fan of Ayn Rand. He wanted ads on Wikipedia and that created the friction between Wales and Larry Sanger (the only guy with a Ph.D [as far as I know] at Bomis, Wales' original company.) In truth, if Wales could charge for different levels of information at Wikipedia, he probably would.....which is why he has tried to capitalize on his leadership/creatorship of Wikipedia in as many ads as possible.
(You knew the reference above had to appear.)
Sunday, October 26, 2014
The Things Wikipedists and Wikipediocratists Don't Seem to Understand.....
.....could fill another set of encyclopedias. To keep things short I will mention two, at least this time.
Point One: Wikipedia is doomed to failure
A real encyclopedia is written, edited, published - and thus finished. You can write yearbooks to add information or new, updated editions every decade, but a published encyclopedia is done. Wikipedia, conversely, is never finished; it must always keep up with current events (for reasons beyond me), and it never tries to limit what it covers, so Pokemon character lists exist on the same site as the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Certainly it's nice to have all this information together somewhere, but the end result is an unwieldy, incoherent mess. And then there's the issue of article fidelity; how many articles have hoaxed or malicious material? How many articles are hoaxes, like the fictional Soviet director Yuri Gadyukin?
A friend of mine, "Stierlitz", once called a plan to make a display encyclopedia set out of the English-language Wikipedia "[p]ure derp", but I think he had it wrong. To actually hold one of the 2,050 volumes in your hands, to see how lumpy many of the articles would look on the printed page, notice how the style can shift from paragraph to paragraph, that would dissuade people far more that Wikipedia is a worthwhile endeavor than anything I could actually write here, even without talking about MONGO.
So this is what Wikipedia really is, a giant tumor-filled shark swimming through a sea of information. A real shark would stop growing, but Wikipedia is an unnatural technological being which grows as it moves, and has no instructions to stop growing or shed unnecessary parts of itself. Such a thing is destined to die badly once it stops moving, and so it is with Wikipedia. `Bots have replaced content writers, editors are dropping, more and more articles have "hats" from years ago asking for the article to be re-formatted or merged with another article. If there had been a limit to the amount of information possible to display, or if each Wikipedia had been designed to be broken up between arbitrary categories (a History Wikipedia, a Science Wikipedia, a Pop-Culture Wikipedia), it wouldn't be the fiasco it is now. It would be a different fiasco, but possibly one more manageable.
Point Two: Banning people and deleting their work doesn't end "the problem"
Seriously, kicking people out DOES. NOT. WORK. Either they start up revenge blogs, or revenge messageboards, or they are just lazy and sockpuppet the site they were banned from. Take the example of "ScienceApologist" (now QTxVi4bEMRbrNqOorWBV); he started on Wikipedia in 2004, got into argument over argument over "fringe science" articles, blocked multiple times, was "permanently banned" in 2011. Spent from early 2011 to the summer of 2013 as a Wikipedia unperson, finally let back in under that bizarre handle. During his exile, became "iii" on the Wikipediocracy messageboard when it appeared in 2012. It should be said here that the man who runs the Wikipediocracymessageboard blog is none other than "Herschelkrustofsky", who was thrown off of Wikipedia against the site's own rules a decade ago, because people like "SlimVirgin" and "Cberlet" hated his articles on Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche Youth Movement. "Cberlet" is (shock! horror!) Chip Berlet, who may still be with Political Research Associates; back in 1989, his associate Dennis King wrote an expose titled Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, which gives the reader an idea of where Berlet and King saw LaRouche going.
It should be pointed out that the ban/delete culture slowly creates paranoia about sockpuppets, which beget a plethora of "rules" (which are repeatedly bent), which creates this inquisitor/commissar class, and before you know it the website begins to resemble the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 gaming universe, aka what would happen if the Spanish Inquisition, an S&M parlor, and Frank Herbert's Dune were mashed together while everybody was out of the minds on LSD. This is why people quit (unless they like the abuse), and why this sort of thing is ultimately fatal for a free labor project like Wikipedia: nobody likes a creeping police state.
Point One: Wikipedia is doomed to failure
A real encyclopedia is written, edited, published - and thus finished. You can write yearbooks to add information or new, updated editions every decade, but a published encyclopedia is done. Wikipedia, conversely, is never finished; it must always keep up with current events (for reasons beyond me), and it never tries to limit what it covers, so Pokemon character lists exist on the same site as the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Certainly it's nice to have all this information together somewhere, but the end result is an unwieldy, incoherent mess. And then there's the issue of article fidelity; how many articles have hoaxed or malicious material? How many articles are hoaxes, like the fictional Soviet director Yuri Gadyukin?
A friend of mine, "Stierlitz", once called a plan to make a display encyclopedia set out of the English-language Wikipedia "[p]ure derp", but I think he had it wrong. To actually hold one of the 2,050 volumes in your hands, to see how lumpy many of the articles would look on the printed page, notice how the style can shift from paragraph to paragraph, that would dissuade people far more that Wikipedia is a worthwhile endeavor than anything I could actually write here, even without talking about MONGO.
So this is what Wikipedia really is, a giant tumor-filled shark swimming through a sea of information. A real shark would stop growing, but Wikipedia is an unnatural technological being which grows as it moves, and has no instructions to stop growing or shed unnecessary parts of itself. Such a thing is destined to die badly once it stops moving, and so it is with Wikipedia. `Bots have replaced content writers, editors are dropping, more and more articles have "hats" from years ago asking for the article to be re-formatted or merged with another article. If there had been a limit to the amount of information possible to display, or if each Wikipedia had been designed to be broken up between arbitrary categories (a History Wikipedia, a Science Wikipedia, a Pop-Culture Wikipedia), it wouldn't be the fiasco it is now. It would be a different fiasco, but possibly one more manageable.
Point Two: Banning people and deleting their work doesn't end "the problem"
Seriously, kicking people out DOES. NOT. WORK. Either they start up revenge blogs, or revenge messageboards, or they are just lazy and sockpuppet the site they were banned from. Take the example of "ScienceApologist" (now QTxVi4bEMRbrNqOorWBV); he started on Wikipedia in 2004, got into argument over argument over "fringe science" articles, blocked multiple times, was "permanently banned" in 2011. Spent from early 2011 to the summer of 2013 as a Wikipedia unperson, finally let back in under that bizarre handle. During his exile, became "iii" on the Wikipediocracy messageboard when it appeared in 2012. It should be said here that the man who runs the Wikipediocracy
It should be pointed out that the ban/delete culture slowly creates paranoia about sockpuppets, which beget a plethora of "rules" (which are repeatedly bent), which creates this inquisitor/commissar class, and before you know it the website begins to resemble the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 gaming universe, aka what would happen if the Spanish Inquisition, an S&M parlor, and Frank Herbert's Dune were mashed together while everybody was out of the minds on LSD. This is why people quit (unless they like the abuse), and why this sort of thing is ultimately fatal for a free labor project like Wikipedia: nobody likes a creeping police state.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Why This Blog?
Good question. Pretty much Jimmy Wales' baby has gone from the "hot shit, website of THE FUTURE" to a crumbling, `bot-filled wreck in less than twenty years. It's also full of outright fabrications, spastically myopic coverage of certain topics, edit wars, super-trolls (Willy on Wheels, anyone?), and paid corporate spamming....but we will get to that in time.
The other kludge we will be examining is Wikipediocracy, mainly its message board. The problem here is that many of the Wikipediocrats are ex-Wikipedians, including some of their most monomaniacal editors and content providers like "ScienceApologist" (who posts as "iii"), or "Afadsbad" (who under the name "enwikibadscience" could not stop writing about Cwmhiraeth's Wikipedia idiocy), and the Ukraine-supporting "Kiefer.Wolfowitz." It doesn't help that the guy who is mainly considered to be the supremo of the board, "EricBarbour" actually is only a moderator, and not an administrator, so the poor user is left to the tender mercies of "Zoloft" (a certain Mr. Burns of San Diego, California) and the master do-nothing "greybeard" (allegedly one of the old-timey Usenet guys from the era of cocaine spoons and leisure suits.) Much like with sausage, if you like Wikipediocracy's blog, you definitely don't want to see how they come up with ideas for it on the message board.
It's going to be a bumpy ride.....
The other kludge we will be examining is Wikipediocracy, mainly its message board. The problem here is that many of the Wikipediocrats are ex-Wikipedians, including some of their most monomaniacal editors and content providers like "ScienceApologist" (who posts as "iii"), or "Afadsbad" (who under the name "enwikibadscience" could not stop writing about Cwmhiraeth's Wikipedia idiocy), and the Ukraine-supporting "Kiefer.Wolfowitz." It doesn't help that the guy who is mainly considered to be the supremo of the board, "EricBarbour" actually is only a moderator, and not an administrator, so the poor user is left to the tender mercies of "Zoloft" (a certain Mr. Burns of San Diego, California) and the master do-nothing "greybeard" (allegedly one of the old-timey Usenet guys from the era of cocaine spoons and leisure suits.) Much like with sausage, if you like Wikipediocracy's blog, you definitely don't want to see how they come up with ideas for it on the message board.
It's going to be a bumpy ride.....
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