Larry Sanger wanted a restricted encyclopedia for experts only. Jimbo was just the money behind things, but Jimbo didn't like Larry's restrictiveness and liked Ben Kovitz's idea. However Ben Kovitz was the real founder of Wikipedia.


Copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz

We discussed this last week, and I wrote a blog post on it.

Larry Sanger wanted a restricted encyclopedia for experts only.

Nupedia?

Nupedia was created by Jimbo Wales. I have not heard any suggestion that this is disputed.

Ben Kovitz is the person that had the idea for using a wiki for Nupedia, not Larry Sanger, and certainly not Jimbo Wales. It is in Wikipedia's history of Wikipedia article, tucked away in there, but earlier revisions made it more clear.

The whole dispute about whether Larry Sanger was a co-founder or whether Jimbo Wales was the sole founder is nonsense, since Ben Kovitz is the person that came up with the idea. He presented it to Larry Sanger, who in turn asked Jimbo if he would accept it.

Of course, Ben Kovitz wanted Nupedia to use wiki technology, and Jimbo ended up created Wikipedia as, initially at least, a separate project. This may have been Jimbo's idea, or it may have been Larry Sanger's idea. That part is not clear. But the idea for Wikipedia itself was Ben Kovitz's idea.

I even e-mailed Ben Kovitz himself for confirmation, and he was able to confirm that personally. He was going to post here, but I am not sure if he ever got around to it.

Of course, then it gets to how you define "founder". From 2001-July 2004, Ben Kovitz was regarded by Wikipedia as its ideological founder. In July 2004, David Gerard made a major change to the history of Wikipedia to indicate that Ben Kovitz was no longer regarded as having anything much to do with it. Soon after that, Jimbo Wales tried to pretend that Larry Sanger had nothing to do with it either.

This revelation was interesting to many of us, because it made a mockery of the whole "sole founder vs co-founder" issue, because really, in an ideological sense, neither of them were founders - Ben Kovitz was.

Ben Kovitz primary founder, Larry Sanger secondary founder, Jimbo Wales tertiary founder.

Of course, Jimbo put most of the work in to it.

Its a bit like Wikipedia Review's founder is Igor. The founder of the paid web site was probably mainly Selina and myself (it was her idea, she put it together, I worked out the terms and put the money up). Similar kind of deal. If Selina suddenly claimed to be the sole founder, that'd be as idiotic as Jimbo claiming to be the sole founder of Wikipedia.

Will Wikipedia ever block Larry or Ben to silence them?

Ben can still post. Ben doesn't have a big argument it seems. Larry is the one complaining. It puts it all in to perspective really.

If Selina had principal administrator rights, trumping all others, and she could fire you, and she was the head of WR, and she spoke authoritatively for WR, she could do that, and get away with it, most likely.

A lot of work is like that. Once you are gone, you are forgotten, and your legacy does not live on.

I doubt Ben will post here. I'm sure he's been warned that this is a site for stalkers and neo-nazis, and to beware, lol.

The problem is that all three have credible claims to being the "founder".

The difficulty arises from the fairly loose popular definition of "founder". Who built the Eiffel Tower?

Here is the location where the idea of Wikipedia was first discussed, according to the above discussion.

Yes, the definition of founder is ambiguous.

Ben Kovitz can claim to be founder for the obvious reasons that it is his idea.

Larry Sanger can claim to be founder because he formulated that idea in to something workable, and then implemented that idea.

Jimbo Wales can claim to be founder because he was the boss and authorised for the idea to be added, then helped to add the infrastructure of it.

As I say, all 3 are founders - primary, secondary and tertiary. Ben Kovitz is the primary founder, Larry Sanger is the secondary founder and Jimbo Wales is the tertiary founder.

Of course, after foundation, there is no dispute that it has become primarily Jimbo Wales' work. And indeed Nupedia is not disputed (as far as I know) as being founded solely by Jimbo Wales.

The issue is purely a dispute over foundation. All 3 should be recognised. Not equally, because their involvement was different. But in the foundation section, all should be mentioned with the same amount of text, stating factually their involvement. Then allow the reader to determine who was the true founder.

I must note that Ben has been rather modest about the whole thing. But then, had I been the primary founder of Wikipedia, and knowing full well what it had become, I believe that being modest would hardly be enough for me--I would be looking to make myself invisible.

From what we can tell, he didn't like Nupedia all that much. He contributed very little to Wikipedia, and had no real interest in it. It may be that he had an idea, then saw it become a whopping great failure, so gave up on it. It may well be that he thinks "Oh shit what have I done?" or something like that. It may be that he tried to make them then divert it in to the appropriate way, but failed. Who knows. It is all speculation.

Certainly we know that Ben has had precious little to do with Wikipedia since he had the idea, and indeed had precious little to do with Nupedia either.

a founder is someone who implements the idea...not necessarily the guy who thought up the idea. implementing an idea is the hard part.

By that definition, the founder is Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales.

But I don't agree with that definition.

Think of Wikipedia Review by comparison.

Igor thought up the idea for it, the name, and used ProBoards, and then did virtually nothing about it. He didn't advertise, didn't write any threads, didn't know what to do with it. Then Blu Aardvark came in and set up everything, set up the different threads, the idea not to allow guests to post, the rules on e-mail registrations, and everything else.

So is Blu Aardvark the founder of Wikipedia Review then?

Or perhaps it is Golbez, who thought up the idea for the separate domain name, the hosting, and so forth.

Or perhaps it is Selina, who put more thought in to it, and implemented it, and then developed this whole board.

Or perhaps it is little ole me who put in some money, and thought up some rules for how we'd do it, which ultimately we didn't use anyway.

Just as a comparison, we all say that Igor is the founder. Yet Igor's role in WR is about as prominent as Ben Kovitz's role on Wikipedia. Should we start saying that Blu Aardvark and Selina are joint founders, in line with Wikipedia's definition?

with my limited understanding of the twists and turns of this board, information i've mainly got from blissy and digging around a bit, i would be comfortable saying that blu and selina founded this board. blissy could also be considered a founder as he took the action of registering the domain--as could Somey as he has taken the responsibility of maintaining the software and the community recently. the proboard days was the founding of the idea, but someone took it and implemented it elsewhere, with their own goals and agenda in mind. i don't really feel comfortable determining who founded WR though, as i don't feel like i understand it fully.

having an idea and acting on that idea are two different things. all it takes to have an idea is imagination, but implementing the idea takes tangible action and responsibility. to be a "founder" of something conveys some degree of responsibility and action. in general, i'm more of a dreamer myself and don't do much on the acting.

You can't call someone a founder if he wasn't around at the start. Yes, we're all very grateful to Somey, who has done more than anyone else recently to keep us afloat and not founder (in the other meaning of the word), but he's not a founder.

I guess people have different views on what constitutes being a founder. AFAIK all of the above have been happy to refer to Igor as the founder of WR. It is consistent, therefore, to label Ben Kovitz as the founder of Wikipedia.

Well, what a wonderful ego trip it's been reading this page! Thanks for the invitation, blissyu2.

Indeed I didn't put much work into Wikipedia beyond suggesting turning Nupedia into a wiki and answering Larry Sanger's objections. I didn't come up with the name, and I didn't come up with any money. I've only made about 300 edits on Wikipedia. Beyond that, all I've done for it is evangelize a bit. Mostly, I just feel privileged to have played a small role in something that has turned out to be of historical importance. I'm amazed that someone actually listened to such an odd suggestion and that it grew into the huge public resource that I dreamed of that night at the taco stand. It feels like the sort of unlikely story that happens only in science-fiction novels.

Also, it was really cool that someone called me a "polymath".

Nice to met you Ben. I love how you understate your contribution. It is as refreshing as watching an old Jimmy Steward movie. Placing Nupedia on a wiki was as Mr. Twain would say, "the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

You mean like Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity, where a large organization of time-travelers analyzes all of recorded history and figures out what the crucial points are where they can make a trivial change (in one example in the novel, the change is to move a chemical bottle from one shelf to another in a lab, and hence stop a discovery from taking place which in turn leads to a boom in space travel, which they judge to be bad for humanity in the long run) and lead to massive change in the future of civilization, hopefully for the better? So, if the Eternals judged that Wikipedia was a bad influence on the culture, they'd go back to that taco restaurant and do something (poison the burritos so you got sick and went home?) to stop it.

Howdy Do {{distinguish2|[[Howdy Doody]], the [[Gee Dubya]] Impersonator}} —

I used to be a major addict of SF, so I've pretty much read all the pertinent literature, at least the classics of my time, and I have more lately been caching ↑ on the movies of that genre, so I think I know what you mean.

Just by way of cutting to the chase, let me share with you my current point of view.

Wikipedia is an experiment in Social Engineering that failed, and failed miserably.

It has now become one of the biggest threats to Public Education and Public Information yet devised by the so-called mind of uncritical delusionists and unforesightful self-promoters.

Now, I do not hold you to blame for that, as it's clear from what you say about the level of your actual participation in the ways of Wikipedia that you are scarcely familiar with how it actually operates in the current time frame. So you remain in the Dream with no awareness of how the Reality departs from the Vision.

Initiating an experiment that that fails to achieve its espoused objective is not a terribly novel thing in this chancey world of ours. Failing to notice the Departure of the Actuality from the Possibility is however a fault, and refusing to see the Drift of a Project into destructive degeneration is something that does deserve the most severe censure.

So, I'm wondering, what will it be?

Welcome to The Wikipedia Review …

Jonny


a hit, a palpable hit —

Jonny

There's an article by Zordrac on Wikinfo

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/index.php/Ben_Kovitz

which has the Imprimatur of Fred Bauder:

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/index...Talk:Ben_Kovitz

Sorry, should be Jimmy Stewart.

Nupedia on a wiki was the correct formula for the critical mass that would permit the encyclopedic project to succeed. Wikipedia has since been abysmally implemented, not addressing problems which include credentials and quality control, the impact of a dysfunctional social networking community and social responsibility to interests not represented in the "community" including but not limited to BLP victims. Wikipedia cannot be viewed as a success. But Ben was able to solve one aspect (participation) needed for a successful project. He, of course, bears no responsibility for the disappointing failures that have since occurred.

OMFG! OMFG! Dan Tobias just physically threatened another editor! Ban him! Shut down this domain as an attackkkkkkk BADSITE! Oh, dear, oh, dear....

Hm³, doesn't that make Wikipedia itself an @taco* site?

Jes wot I always suspected.

Jonny

* A pun best served with a Canadian accent, eh?

By me, just so that people don't get confused. My Wikinfo password got changed somehow so I had to use another name (Blissyu2 on Wikinfo is also me).

Of course, Fred Bauder banned me a few days ago because I dared to suggest that someone saying lies about me was wrong.

Also note that that article was practically what Ben Kovitz wrote, just rehashed to make it more readable. Very little original content there, so I don't really feel like I should be credited as the "author".

Perhaps I'm still living in the Dream. I still think Wikipedia is positively wonderful.

I've been browsing Wikipedia Review, occasionally coming across sarcastic rhetoric about how Wikipedia is a gigantic threat to civilization, but I haven't yet come across any reasons for this. The closest I've seen is complaints by people who lost the inevitable political fights that happen in something as large-scale and conflict-oriented as Wikipedia.

Would you please direct me to a page that briefly (really, briefly) summarizes (i.e. does not go into great detail), in a factual manner (without hyperbole, sarcasm, vitriol, etc.) the reasons for these extreme condemnations of Wikipedia?

I can't speak for everyone, but I can give you my personal take on why Wikipedia really is evil.

If you look at the demographics of wikipedia users, you will see that these users only represent a fraction of the World's population, and that this is not likely to change due to obvious problems with the way the World is. However, Wikipedia has the core idea of "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge".

Given the demographics and the sociology at work (the obvious exclusion of women, the outright censorship of minority religious and nationalist idea, the exclusion of experts etc etc etc), these two aspects of the project cannot be reconciled. How can you have "the sum of knowledge" if you don't have access to the knowledge which exists outside of white, first world, techie society? Yet, Wikipedia pretends that this problem is unimportant, and they are in the process of exporting this vision of the World to the third and fourth world as "the sum of all human knowledge".

But what is this really? If you've only got the white, male, industrialized country, techie perspective and you're fighting to keep the other perspectives out (just have a look at the Arb-com and Administrative noticeboards--including the new "fringe theories" noticeboard-- and you'll see plenty of that), this ends up being yet another experience in colonialism, validating one perspective as the "sum of all knowledge" and giving the message to those who don't participate that they are not part of the "sum of all knowledge".

This process happens daily: If one does not validate the group position ("consensus"), one is seen as "not assuming good faith", "being disruptive", "having a conflict of interest" or even more vaguely "being a troll", and one then is actively excluded from the group ("community bans", Arb-com, blockings). Most of these decisions about "consensus", whether an user is creating problems and the ultimate exclusion process, are carried out by only a handful of users, in many cases less then ten, who are the same who make the same decisions every day.

So, the process of exclusion is active. And it creates a situation which allows the same demographic group to decide what is the "sum of all knowledge" and then allows this demographic group to validate their position as being correct and all other positions as being wrong.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (the father of anthropology) has repeatedly made the point that one cannot judge the values of one culture using the values of another. Yet, Wikipedia does even more than that, establishing a clear established hierarchy between "what we know" and "what you don't know". And given the power structure, the bureaucracy, and Mr. Wales own PR machine, there is very little (read "no") chance of this changing.

Is this more clear?

Some might phrase that as "complaints by people banned on trumped-up evidence for daring to disagree with the strong POV of certain influential figures, and not unblocked even when the evidence is discredited".



Oh, he's Jewish. His views don't count on Wikipedia.

Well, that was kinda my point in the first place.

Didn't anthropology exist before 1908, when that guy was born? Is he related to the inventor of blue jeans? He's one of a cluster of people, along with Foucalt and Derrida, who get constantly cited by the sort of people who like to push densely incomprehensible academic prose in support of loony-left PC nonsense about how there's no such thing as objective truth, except that western culture is objectively evil.

To me, the biggest issue that I have is the ability for Wikipedia to change history.

If Wikipedia was just a group blog, or "Jimbo's big bag o' trivia" then it wouldn't matter. The problem is that it is being quoted on news reports, in court cases, in student research papers, and even by teachers. The problem is that it is taken as seriously as a normal encyclopaedia is.

If Wikipedia limited itself to the same topics as exist in a normal encyclopaedia, then it wouldn't matter. The problem is that rather than 50,000 articles, they now have 2 million, which means that they have 1.95 million articles that do not have a clearly established source to compare them to. That is a lot of room for Wikipedia to set up their own version of events. 97.5% of their articles do not exist in a popular encyclopaedia. On 97.5% of topics, Wikipedia is going to have a reference while there is nowhere else that you can look at.

If Wikipedia's history-changing was limited to unimportant articles (fan articles, purely factual articles, articles which exist elsewhere) then it wouldn't really matter. The problem is that their worst articles are primarily controversial articles, articles with multiple viewpoints, issues which it is really important to get right. Their best articles are their fan fiction and purely factual articles.

If Wikipedia was written by experts, who established what their bias was, and their credentials, and we could compare everything to them, then it wouldn't matter if they got it wrong sometimes, because then they would be liable for their mistakes, and we could account for their bias. The problem is that Wikipedia has a Neutral Point of View that attacks experts, often banning them, and often taking their side so much that articles end up horribly biased in their favour. Wikipedia worries more about bias than they worry about facts, and they allow idiots to write articles and write them really badly.

If Wikipedia was diligent about their WP:OWN rule, then there wouldn't be any controlled articles, and it wouldn't matter, because then we'd be able to get things back on track.

In the end, it doesn't matter on a global scale whether I was banned. All that it matters is that my expertise, as the only person who has ever edited one particular article and was an expert on it, is lost. Big deal. In the end, yes, it means that they have one horribly written article. Sadly, that article is of national importance to my country, and to everyone who lives in that country. Sadly, it means that on that article, and that issue, and the 100+ associated issues, Wikipedia has changed truth, and it becomes increasingly difficult for people to find out the real truth about what happened.

But my being banned isn't the issue here. Daniel Brandt getting banned doesn't matter. What matters is that articles were changed to reflect truth changing. What matters is that lies are presented as fact. What matters is that Wikipedia has no intention to follow relevant laws. What matters is that Wikipedia is taken far too seriously.

You will find that most people here recognise that the primary issues to do with Wikipedia are variations on that theme, and this is the primary reason why we are here. Our individual specifics as to what caused the problem, or how to fix it, or precisely why it is a big deal may vary, but we are here to try to educate people as to the dangers of Wikipedia, and to expose their problems to help others.

We are in essence educators so that people when they use Wikipedia can use it with a grain of salt. Use the information, but don't trust the information. Most people here like most elements of Wikipedia. We wouldn't be here if we'd never used it and thought it was a lost cause. This isn't here for hatred, this is here for an attempt to improve the situation.

Not exactly. In France, the anthropological tradition comes out of the thinking of Emile Durkkeim (a sociologist) through Marcel Maus, Durkheim's nephew and an ethnologist. Strauss is considered to be the father of anthropology in France because he instituted principals which institutionalized and differentiated it from ethnology through his ideas about scientific process, structuralism and culture-specific analysis of different cultures. This is probably French POV, but it's the accepted story in France. Is in many things, a lot of things happened at around the same time. I don't think that anyone can doubt Lévi-Strauss' importance in the history of anthropology, however.

To lump LS, Foucault and Derrida in the same bag is to completely misunderstand what each was trying to do. First of all, LS and Derrida disagreed so violently about just about everything that they stopped talking to each other entirely. Michel Foucault studied structuralism as a matter of course, but from a purely philosophical, non-scientific point of view which has very little at all to do with LS' own ideas. You can't even lump these three into the same generation because Foucault was much younger than the two others.

Sorry about dropping this name, but I happen to have a direct connection to LS and an indirect connection to Foucault, through family friends. I don't really like Derrida , so you won't see me quoting him very much, though.

The idea is not that Western Culture is inherently evil. What is evil is the imposition of western cultural ideas on other cultures where the value systems are completely different. This isn't PC: it's objective reality in the context of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist point of view.



This is empirical proof that Wikipedia cannot ever be "the sum of all knowledge". This is not an isolated case. There are many instances when experts (ie the only people who have studied the subject in question long enough to understand what is the truth) or even simply references to experts and their work have been suppressed to support the idea that "we know more than you do".

It's that central lie that is the inherent problem. You can't ban people or exclude content without losing part of "the sum of all knowledge". Otherwise, it's not "all knowledge".

If the mission statement were true, we should be seeing people at Wikipedia writing to experts saying "please, could you help us by adding what you know to this article which deals with your area of expertise?".

Is that happening? I've never seen it. I have met a large number of academics who are so fed up by being told what is true by people who don't know that they will not even discuss Wikipedia, even on a theoretical level.

Bliss,

Of course I know what you mean by them, but phrases like "changing history" and "changing truth" tend to fuzz the issue in the long run, and in a sense they only play right into the mind-messers hands.

In pragmatic semiotic terms, it is important to distinguish the Object, the thing you are talking about, no matter what kind of thing it may be, from the Sign, the representation that you have of the object.

The beginning of clarity in these muddles means keeping straight about the different roles of Objects and Signs — for roles they are, not immutable essences — and keeping track of the relation between the Object Domain and the Sign Domain.

There's a paper I once wrote on this stuff here.

An Encyclopedia is a Sign, a representation of something, one would hope a representation of significant objective realities. Of course, it is also an Object in its own right, since anything we talk or think about becomes an object of our discourse or thought.

One of the things about our representations of reality is that they are designed to be far more easily changeable than the realities themselves. That is one of the things that makes them useful in that role.

The upshot is this. Wikipedia has gone AWOL from its assigned post of representing significant objective realities, the job that mormal folks expect a normal encyclopedia to fill, and becomes something else, something more like a collective hallucination or a mass hypnotic episode. But it's not just another random delirium with no direction — its course is being manipulated by people who know exactly what they want out of it and who have a ¬2b-sneezed-@ level of instinct or training in getting exactly what they want out of it.

Jonny

You and I should form a faction, "People who Think Wikipedia is Great, but that it Still has Something to Learn from Critics, and Everybody should Try to Understand One Another's Point of View without Demonizing One Another and Calling One Another Evil."

It is indeed the confusion with the reality of the objects and their interpretations through signs, our own recent discussion of the linguistic aspects of pedophilia here being one example of this, which creates the dilemma. This is a very important point.

The whole insistence in Wikipedia on both "Neutral point of view" and "No original research" underlines the inherent contradiction. Every person has a distinct point of view which is valid from his or her perspective. The process of merely selecting the point of view which is then arbitrarily labeled "neutral" must therefore reflect some sort of "original research", no matter how primitive this level of reasoning might be ("everybody KNOWS THAT!" being the general reason given, ignoring the fact that what everybody knows might not be what is true...).

The problem is that although each individual's point of view is inherently valid from his perspective, analyzing his own experience to come up with some idea which can allow him to communicate this experience to another person as a universal experience requires thought, study and quite a bit of good luck. Even in the process of selecting some sources and excluding others, part of the universal experience is going to be lost. And bias is going to be present, even before one word has been written, simply by what one is considering and what one is not.

There is no way of divorcing Wikipedia from these rhetorical fallacies. It's the idea at the core which is the inherent problem: people generally know what's right and the more people you have editing, the more "right" it's likely to be. Well, time and time again, history has proven that people generally think that they know what's right, but a handful of people have, by the power of their reasoning, shown them that the truth is not what it appears to be. The process of these sorts of ideas entering popular consciousness is almost always achieved against great resistance by those who would prefer to continue thinking in the same way as before.

Is there any reason to suppose that things are going to be different this time around? I think not.

I don't want to change your opinion Ben. I like you just as you are. Many of us at WR have given up on WP but still hold out some hope for the encyclopedic project. We look forward to a fork, successor organization or other next incarnation of the idea. Whether you become disillusioned with WP or are able to keep your faith intact until the very end you would certainly be a welcomed participant in whatever comes next.

Still your question deserves an answer. I don't believe that any one thread will give you what you're after. From time to time one or another of us (myself included) will write a grand essay that reaches for this kind of overview. But such threads do not generate the most productive discussions. Instead I would suggest that you seek out threads that relate to the following topics:

• the social networking and/or role playing game aspects of WP.
• the distortion and manipulation of "consensus" and decision making/dispute resolution processes;.
• the disregard of credentials and insistence upon pseudonymous identities.
• abusive admins, accusation of sockpuppetry and the mobilization against "vandalism."
• the handling of BLP issues and other issues of social responsibility to interests "outside" of WP.
• the handling of serious scandals.
• issues of governance.

I hope this helps.

There's still a bit of hyperbole and vitriol there, but this page might be helpful to you, Mr. Kovitz.

If I had to "really, briefly" summarize why I condemn Wikipedia, it is this:

(1) Unnamed characters have equal more power to edit content than those who disclose and prove who they are in real life.

(2) The thrill of painting content with one's personal point of view too often outweighs the original intent of the "NPOV" policy, which was to allow space for multiple, credible points of view.

(3) Because of Section 230 protection, Wikipedia's trustees forever maintain that they are not "publishing" information, but rather "providing" an Internet service for non-member users. However, the reality that we all see is that Wikipedia is a publication. So, when libel appears, someone ought to be responsible for it -- but (see Item #1 above) the true culprits are too difficult to find, so both the Wikimedia Foundation and the anonymous editors who enjoy their work (see Item #2) get off scott free.

By its very definition, Wikipedia is an irresponsible publication. How is that a "good thing"?

Greg

I'm in! Let's make everyone Secretary General.

It's time for me to go to work, but I'll try to comment on the other posts this weekend.

I can't speak for Bliss, but I've been using "changing history" and "changing truth" as a form of shorthand here to summarise problems without getting too bogged down in esoteric analysis. Perhaps unwisely as you note. Though I was much influenced by my brief foray into semiotics some years ago, well what I could understand of it at least, I've begun to rebel against its odour in my own mind. And my experiences at wikipedia and the wider internet have played a part in this. Perhaps another reason to damn the project, but I digress.

By these two crude terms of "history" and "truth", I mean this:

There exist historical episodes where the main themes are known to many people, lets use the Charge of the light brigade as an example. Of the people that have heard of this historical episode, say 95% know almost nothing beyond the basic story, 3% know something of the background and the events, 1.5% have made a proper historical study of it and have written about it, and 0.5% are experts and historians on the subject, having researched it extensively using vast quantities of evidence and detached analysis.

The views and assessments of the 0.5% are what I'm referring to here when I use the shorthand of "history" and "truth". But it is often the case that their discoveries are at odds with the understanding of the 1.5%, the 3% and almost always the 95%. I don't want the work of the 0.5% to be contaminated by the work of the other groups at the top of a child's google search. I don't want those other views to be given "due weight". And I shouldn't have to fight hard to ensure that the work of the 0.5% is the dominant view, only to be told I'm "owning the article" and "forcing my POV on the world" maaaan. For that becomes a "dictatorship of idiots".

For future reference, I'll always link back to this post if and when I rail against the debasing of "truth" and "history" again.

I think you will find that most folks here were living in that Dream at one point or another in recent history — indeed, many of us, like myself, persisted in our Sleep through slap-in-face after slap-in-face after slap-in-face. That's no hyperbole, indeed it's a gross lower bound, and you can look it up in the diffs that anyone here could show you — that is, if you really want to know the truth about that.

Ay, ∃ da rub … Doctor My Eyes …

Slap In Face (SIF) is a phrase from Chairman J-bo's Little Red Book. I think he was talking about reverts of good faith edits — and aren't they all good faith edits? — but it applies more broadly to violations of Wikipedia's Penta-Pillaried-Principles, and even more generally to the Whole Wikipedia Weltanshovung.

SIF is the acid test of whether you stay or whether you go — whether you persist in the Dream of Wikiputia or whether you go, willy nilly, beyond the pale of its dominion. Two classes of people remain in Wikipedia, the Slappers (S¹) and the Slapped-Silly (S²), the latter being those who can take being slapped in the face without waking up until they have no face to lose. Those who wake up, even a little, are quickly identified as threats to the Hypnotic Hive Hallucination (H³) and they are either forced out by hordes of screeching Wiki-Pod-Peeple or they leave on their own recognizance.

Call it a Dream if you must — I have another name for it …

Jonny

In some cases, yes I am talking about changing history in a very real sense. It has happened to the extent that young people are being educated, on at least one issue, in a way that is entirely false, because of Wikipedia's article being false, and that article being the only comprehensive source on the issue.

I take such things very seriously.

Now, you might say that that level of damage doesn't happen a lot. Perhaps there are only 100 times when it has happened in Wikipedia's history. But Lockerbie bombing is surely another one. And aren't there others that are probably happening, it is just that we aren't expert enough in the areas to understand that it has happened?

But the other aspect to this is that even when it isn't outright truth-changing and outright history-changing with a malicious purpose, it can be with an ignorant purpose.

The malicious people, the SlimVirgin's, and the people who control articles are far more dangerous than any kind of innocent idiots that might exist, however. You can cope with those. And indeed vandalism on Wikipedia is a very, very, minor issue. Vandalism only exists to try to give them an excuse for having so many "Vandal fighters". They could change their setup very easily to deal with most vandalism, they simply choose not to for rather obvious reasons.

The real issues are more to do with the people who are established users there who lie and manipulate and pervert things to their own ends. Not random IP addresses, but established people, either admins or people who for some other reason have a lot of power there. These are the real problems on Wikipedia.

Look, we all get that the word history is equivocal in a way that the word truth is not — or not so much — that the word history can mean either (0) the events that actually happened, an object reality, or (1) a historical record, a re*presentation of those events.

I'm just saying that certain forms of word usage tend to get folks in a muddle about that.

Gotta run —

Please see Reasons Why Wikipedia is a Gigantic Threat to Civilization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist, Squeak Box



The reason why textbooks will always be inferior is because you cant search through them, so that is one bad argument (though wikipedia is far from the only online encyclopedia). Does everyopne get that annoyed feeling when reading through/skimming text on paper and realising there is no asearch button. I agree about the c ontempt for expertise at wikipedia, WP:RS being the biggest offender in terms of policy, Squeak Box



I like the comment that we are financing Google with our efforts and contribs because Google (a real shark company) is unquestionably profiting from wikipedia by being able to list it for so many people and things they wouldnt have articles about were it not for wikipedia. Indeed the bbest argument I have heard to stop editing at wikipedia, Squeak Box

Thanks for checking it out. Other people might say it better, but I was aiming for a one page document, and quickly.

Your page is beautiful and succinct, and sums up most of the things that have been discussed here. It certainly summarises all of my complaints about Wikipedia. I don't think it is missing anything.

Oh perhaps "It won't acknowledge any serious criticism of itself" could be added.

Done, and thanks.

TWISI, the main thing that's missing is enough insight into the fact that Wikipedism is really a disorder of conduct more than a disorder of content.

It has become clear to most clear-sighted observers like myself that content is purely incidental to the Biz And Buzz Of Wikipedia (BABOW).

Content is just the shrubbery that the Online Gamesters Of Wikipedia (OGOW's) cavort in and out and around and through in their merry but bluddy Game Of Seek Less Often Than Hide (GOSLOTH).

Jonny

How do you connect the disorderly conduct of a relatively small group to a "threat to civilization"?