Fiery Angel makes many valid points about Wikipedia and "free culture."

However, I find the evident personal animosity towards and contempt for Mr. Shankbone surprising, and uncalled for.

Are we to surmise from your writings that you see him as some sort of picket-line crossing scab?

Oh, and I'm very sorry. I found the post I was thinking about, and you were instead talking about how Jimbo Wales' position doesn't make sense for a Randian. I mostly agree with you on "Free Culture," and I often comment when you mention people like Lawrence Lessig, because few people are as wrong about good copyright policy as he is.

I apologize a thousand times for the slight.

That's the thing, Kato, I would *love* for Wikipedia or Wikia to make money off my work. Please, do. Or if an immigrant wants to sell a poster of my Chrysler Building in his shop in Times Square with some Walt Whitman quote, great. If I could be so lucky to create something other people want to use, and get something back from. Do you realize that is every artist's dream? It's not money. It's knowing they affected people...that they connected, some way.

And if Kathleen Battle wants to start recording our Opera numbers, then she is welcome to post and I'm sure whoever is there now will gladly take a back seat. I'm sure Kat will stand down if Yitzhak Perlman, or Yo Yo Ma want to begin recording our instruments, or whoever is the oboe person is. But until then, those guys are awesome. And if you got something better, let the community decide that.

I find a lot of the arguments by some people (not all) on here are elitist, and those arguments never win. That's over. That's YouTube. That's SecondLife. That's the Internet. Elitists are dinos. Some of you have very valid criticisms on ways to improve, but if it boils down to amateurs can't do anything, and we all have to listen to the BS FieryAngel goes spouting about her esoterica. And then she has the nerve to call someone like Richard Hell a "lazy bum" when he more than explains his nuance with intelligence. She just doesn't agree with him, and if you don't agree with FieryAngel you get tarred. If I may quote Hell's response to Travis (it seems appropriate):


I didn't say it.

David

Y'see, the reason strawman arguments are popular on Wikipedia is because they have a rule, called "WP:AGF," that essentially precludes people from accusing those who make strawman arguments of doing it for the reasons they usually do it, which are to make the other person look silly to anyone not paying attention, and force the other person to waste time making responses that should be completely unnecessary, like pointing out that nobody here has ever suggested that people like Kathleen Battles or Yitzhak Perlman are the sorts of musician that readers of Wikipedia should expect to find when looking for audio files of musical compositions. Obviously the issue isn't really the fact that the compositions are performed by amateurs; the issue is that they're performed by administrators. The former, in itself, would probably create no chilling effect whatsoever on other people wishing to upload audio files of themselves to replace, or even just augment, the currently available ones. The latter, however, probably does.

So right there I wasted almost 5 minutes of my time pointing out something that should be completely obvious to anyone. It doesn't sound like much, but it adds up.

You're not making any sense. If you ask me, the arguments that "never win" are actually the ones that start with a ludicrous premise, such as the idea that issues regarding Wikipedia can be boiled down to a starkly-contrasting conflict between "elitists" and "amateurs" that doesn't actually exist in the first place, except maybe in Larry Sanger's mind. Reality tends to be more complex than that...

That's still not to say that the basic question here can't be stated fairly simply. If traditional, commercial, peer-reviewed, editorially-accountable encyclopedias are driven out of business by one free-content, expert-averse, unaccountable encyclopedia-like website (bearing in mind that this has already happened), does the world benefit, or does it suffer?

"Anything"? If you mean "create a reliable and well-written encyclopedia," well, I could see that maybe. Then again, I'd say amateurs do a much better job on the Pokemon stuff than professionals could do, no matter how hard they tried.

But more to the point (and I assume you didn't mean to include the word "if," since you left out the "then" part), it doesn't "boil down" to that at all. I suspect you're saying that because you don't generally get into ideological or administrative disputes, so I suppose it's forgivable... But just to be clear, if WP's critics were solely or even primarily concerned with the fact that WP is written and administered by amateurs, this website would be about a tenth the size it is now, and it would probably be a lot less reviled by WP'ers too, I'd say.

Come to think of it... "criticisms on ways to improve"? Hopefully you meant "criticisms that suggest ways to improve."


You're saying that because he's capable of explaining his nuance with intelligence, he can't be a lazy bum? I wasn't aware those were mutually exclusive. Besides, even though I can hardly blame him, he really didn't answer the question. "The truth is that there is no truth" is a cop-out, and besides, he probably stole that from a Boomtown Rats song called "Nice 'n' Neat."

Anyhoo, I liked "Blank Generation," but "Marquee Moon" was a much better album all 'round, really - suggesting that perhaps those guys were better off without him.

You're still not getting it. I'm not concerned with "elitists" (whatever that means, as I personally don't agree with organizing anything in terms of hierarchical structures, which I personally find to be basically meaningless outside of expressing one's own opinion) and "amateurs". An "amateur" can do just as good a job as an "elitist", as long as they start with one simple process: asking the question "why?".

My problem with you (which is, in essence my problem with Hell's response and by extension, my problem with Wikipedia) is that you don't ask yourself "why?" before you do anything. You just keep cranking out the content and then when somebody points out that "that photo isn't a cornsnake and that's not a mouse foetus" or "the photo of the outside of a building housing a right-wing organization doesn't tell us anything about what happens inside" or "your punk rock poet didn't answer the question", instead of actually THINKING about what is being said to you, you try to undermine the credibility of the messenger. You don't consider the consequences of what you're doing at all, you simply keep producing like a cog in the mindless machine that WP has become....or perhaps as WP was indeed initially conceived.

Your interviews are a case in point: you discuss...yourself, Wikipedia, the media, sexuality, fashion etc etc...and pretty much everything except for....the subject of the interview itself. You're bouncing the Wikipedia experience off of all of these famous names to get to the point where you can point to them and say "SEE, they all think that WP's important too!".

But what does this teach us about the World and Existence, especially those of us who have said "no, thank you" to the delicious koolaid?

Images, concepts, points of view, expressions, are all parts of ways we define our society. Artistic, editorial and scientific acts which have value are those that provoke reactions in others and allow us all to progress. Having this kind of exchange take place requires first an initial conception of what the act means. It all starts with asking the question "why?" and then finding the answer.

This content-generating machine simply produces meaningless noise which, as it is "free", is specifically engineered to be "valueless". I'm being to think that this is the whole point: it's the specific "dumbing down" of Society through an exultation of the "white noise" that makes up the daily existence of the lives of many people. And since analysis of the information (NPOV/RS) and creativity (NOR) are specifically forbidden, the phenomenon is basically of a non-thinking army of worker ants mindlessly spouting back images and expressions of Society's definition of what is acceptable and accepted.

Now, the question : Why has this been thought to be necessary? It's not as if there weren't perfectly valid encyclopedias out there. Even the poor can go to public libraries (yes, they even have those in Africa, you know??) and look things up for free. And what does the encyclopedia business have to do with all of the "spin-off" projects, especially Wiki-news?

Clearly, this is not the agenda.

I don't have the answer to this question yet, but I keep looking. Lots of us do that here. Sometimes we get things wrong, but we've been right on more than one occasion. However, one idea keeps coming back to me with more and more frequency and that is:

People who don't think are much easier to manipulate.

Somehow, I think that the key to understanding this project is hidden inside this idea.



I'm very sorry that you find my direct comments about Mr. Shankbone to be aggressive, Proabivouac, but I can assure you that I have no animosity nor contempt for him personally.

Might I remind you that we are not on Wikipedia here and that I personally feel that the focus on issues of "civility" associated with that project are a means of keeping people from expression their opposition to certain aspects of that project? I do agree that standards of decorum should be upheld here, but I don't think that I've crossed the line in any way in this discussion, a discussion which was started in another thread by the subject himself and then transfered here at his request.

Now, it is difficult to discuss Mr. Shankbone's activities on Wikipedia without discussing him personally because....in my opinion, that's exactly the focus of all of his activities on Wikipedia. It's specifically this thoughtless exploitation of the system that I object to and these objections cannot be expressed without a discussion of the subject.

So, I will apologize for causing you distress, but I fail to see how we can discuss this (or any other) editor without...discussing the editor.

Apology accepted. However, I wasn't really upset. So, forget about it.

(PSSTTT!! David, over here! I enjoyed the Daria reference, but did you know that there is an article about The Fiery Angel on Wikipedia???? Honestly, there is!



How about that???)

One of the hazards of being of a creative mindset is that one is potentially tempted to craft a highly imaginative theory of what's in the other person's mind.

One of the hazards of being cocksure to the point of hubris is that one is potentially tempted to publish such haphazard theories of mind as if they were the irrefutable ground truth.

I think that Lévi-Strauss' point was that in a society in which airplanes did not exist, that the statement "the airplane stays up and you stay up with it" has no meaning within that society. You can demonstrate what your society understands about this, but that does not mean that the other society will understand the same concept that you're describing. They may perceive the same event as something else. However, it is meaningless to call either society "advanced" or "primative" based on this interaction because the two systems are not using the same basis to make judgements about the World.

I am reminded of a trip that I made to Japan a few years ago. My hosts (from a respected University) took me to a Shinto shrine and asked me to have my fortune told by one of the monks there. I did and suddenly there was quite a lot of discussion in Japanese, with no translation offered and afterwards, it was announced that I would be traveling back home one week later than planned and I was given no choice in the matter. Since my hosts' institution was paying for my trip and expenses, it was all taken care of ....and to this day, I have no idea what happened. I am convinced that even if somebody had explained it to me, that I wouldn't have understood the explanation. And this all happened in Tokyo in a community of University educated people.

The phenomenon of the Internet trying to get us all in the same mindset is working towards making these types of situations less likely, but do we really want everybody to think exactly the same things, everywhere? I certainly don't.....

Shankbone,

You're wasting your time here if you're expecting any of the long-term members to break ranks. The decision about you has already been made in secret. Now the pack is just trying to keep you from mauling any of its weaker cubs.

Emperor

O, the irony. The great defender of the "amateur" voice against the elite - unless the voice is dissenting, in which case it "requires" a "study".

You're either misdirecting, or you haven't been paying attention. I recommend you re-read everything that's been posted on this site for the last couple of years, for starters. (Feel free, honestly, re-reading old posts isn't "stalking").

The analysis that I've been reading suggests the opposite -- that the cult of amateur is effectively displacing authentic and credentialed subject matter experts.

This is the problem that GlassBeadGame, Raymond Arritt, and Bob Stevens (User:Filll) have been worrying about under the label "Expert Withdrawal."

I have to agree here. David Shankbone seems to be oblivious to a lot of things, not that self-aware and a needy, but other than that he seems to be relatively harmless (unless oblivious needy people get on your nerves.)

But at the root of it, isn't this really just another incident where someone from Wikipedia shows up here and says, "This place would be a lot better if everyone didn't dislike Wikipedia so much"? Why would that require a "secret decision," and why would we "break ranks" over something like that?

I actually think Mr. Shankbone makes quite a few good points; it's just that they're in danger of drowning in strawmen and self-promotionalism. I don't think he's just here to waste our time, and of course I don't blame him for the self-promotionalism at all, but the strawmen... I mean, look at Dan Tobias, for example. He did a lot of that stuff at first, but over time he came to realize we weren't having any, he altered his tactics, and now he's remarkably (if grudgingly) well-respected among us, at least for a pro-Wikipedia member.

The same could easily be true of Shankbone, if he decides to stick around. He just has to give us a little more credit for, I dunno, maybe not intelligence, but at least an ability to see past the distraction ploys and layers of abstraction that WP proponents like to use, if only because those things work so well over there.

David Shankbone raised some interesting points, and was rare in that he exuded some of the positive reasons why people get involved in Wikipedia. Though I disagree with a lot of his ideas about that site, I always like hearing someone talking about the act of creation no matter what the consequences.

I have offered to conduct a brief PM discussion / debate with David which we could edit for the blog with mutual agreement. Portraying two different points of view at their clearest, without the gamesmanship and goading that can occur on the forum.

Good idea, Kato. I'm all in favor of civil and enlightening dialogue.

I think the most threatening thing about the podcast was that everyone came across as reasonable. This is the cabal's worst nightmare, especially when people read rants like Raul's.

I'm glad Durova is a reformed character, because at this point she would have been pointing out that being reasonable was all just a feint.

Sometimes it is useful to remember that we will not convert the die-hards, but if we want to change hearts and minds in the general public and "disinterested" editors, espcially via the press, then appearing to be normal people is a good way to go (being normal would be better, but we have to work with what we have got!).

I suppose that's true... I mean, I considered trying to explain my theory of how gateways to parallel universes can be opened by sprinkling table salt on fermented onions while watching re-runs of T.J. Hooker, but it seemed just a smidgen off-topic at the time.

You have to use Sea Salt.

One thinks of the famous George Lyman Kittredge of the Harvard English Dept., who for years was the acknowledged world expert on Shakespeare and several other topics, but never did get his Ph.D. When asked why not, he famously replied, "But who would examine me?" Here's a guy who had some credentials but not others.

I'd like to pursue the topic more broadly, if you will. What do we do in Wikipedia or Citizendium with the narrowminded mad amateur, so beloved in the UK, who really is the world expert on some topic, and everybody (even in academia) knows it, and they go to him when they really need the answer. His articles for Train History Mag or Gun Magazine or Night Moth Collectors Magazine or whatever are read by the profs who have subscriptions, and use his or her material when they need to. Sometimes with attribution and sometimes not . Or think of the American tinkerer-- the Wright brothers or John Browning or Burt Rutan and a hundred others in the tradition. Mt. Everest was climbed by amateurs (Hillary was a beekeeper in Summers to pay for climbing in Winters)-- in fact most mountains have historically been first climbed by amateur people with "day-jobs," because rarely did could you find anybody to pay you to climb moutains-- the modern culture of "product endorsement" and "tourist guiding" is a relatively new thing. And the era of government-sponsored "big-science" research really only dates from WW II-- before that it was a few academic labs and otherwise mostly by private patronage, and those people who did it, were either wealthy or had "day jobs," too. IOW, they were technically amateurs. Arthur C. Clarke wasn't a professor of communications when he suggested the idea of a comsat in geosync orbit. The first guy to deliberately build a radiotelescope, Grote Reber, did so in his back yard (it was the Depression in 1937), and so on and so on. These guys all published, of course, which is how we know about them and their priority, but often not (at first) in any pubs with any decent reputations. Wireless World, a hobby mag, for Clarke? Say what?

So what do we do with these guys? In the real world, working groups of men have a very serious discussion tussle with newbies to find out where they go on the knowledge heirarchy, before they decide what to do with them on teams. This has very little to do with credentials and everything to do with what you've done and when. I think it goes all the way back to hunting bands of neolithic guys trying to decide who was to be trusted in the band to do their job at "the other end of the mammoth." This kind of thing is important, since your life depends on it. If you've been part of any kind of techno or amateur culture in the doing of ANYTHING you've seen this assessment going on. It stands in for a lot of the formal rank markers that you see in academia or the military, but it still works.

In Wikipedia, one of the problems is that this kind of thing is lacking or it is screwed up. Sure, there are the rank-badges of a sort for the various grades of Wikiadminship, but those are only for the medium itself, and have nothing to do with real world knowledge on the subject matter. THAT heirarchy really has to be hashed out on the TALK page, and the admins, who are really only supposed to be moderators, quite often get in the way of it. Imagine, for example, a group of international climbers who meet at the bottom of a very difficult rock and ice route, and they are trying to decide which one of them will lead on the rope for the attempt, and the cops show up and demand that they not talk about their real names and previous climbs and reputations, and that if they do mention them, they must be limited to only what they've published in Climbing Magazine or something. No talking "shop." Can you imagine the chaos? The team never would dare set foot on the thing. Hope you see my point.



Yeah, I figured that out (blasted Hebrew reads the wrong way), but was out of time. The Aleph above still looks wrong, but everybody will get the idea.

Part of the problem is that terms like 'professional' and 'amateur' have two distinct sets of meaning.

On the one hand, we use the terms to indicate whether a person is making a living at it or not. A professional gets paid; an amateur does it for the love of the activity, not for remuneration to earn a living.

But we sometimes use 'amateur' in the sense of 'rank amateur' meaning not particularly competent at the activity.

The problem with wikipedia is one of 'rank amateurism' rather than competent non-professionals whose reward is emotional satisfaction rather than a salary.

Most competent professionals are perfectly content to collaborate with competent non-professionals.

Jon Awbrey wrote something about this previously:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...indpost&p=52741

Kato, I appreciate your keen eye for recollecting and recalling especially cogent observations and insights that, all too often, are buried in the noise.

That whole bit about the Cult Of The Amateur (COTA) has always been a mis-diagnosis of What's Wrong With Wikipedia (WWWW). Amateurs are, by definition and etymology, people who pursue a skilled activity purely for the love of doing it — those of you who are old enough to remember when the Olympics were for amateurs may know what I mean. Nothing about being an amateur says that you have to be an abject klutz at what you do, or despise people adept and lucky enough to get paid for doing it, or envy those with more experience and skill so badly that you refuse to learn what they know, or obstruct people from contributing in areas that you never bothered to learn about.

No, Wikipedia is the Cult Of The Incompetent (COTI), and the only way they know to make themselves feel better about their own dim place in the Sum Of Knowledge is by banning those who might teach them something.

Jon

However, they are very competent at finding ingenious ways of banning people, such as concocting haphazard theories of mind about the person they wish to ban, and then acting on such ungrounded flights of fancy as if they were the ground truth.

Keen's diagnosis is broader than Wikipedia and he is also referring to a more literal meaning of the word Amateur. He fears the dissolution of professional organizations at the hands of amateur projects and the impact that will have on people's livelihoods if nothing else. This is a valid fear, and relates to Wikipedia in that Wales's big-bag-o-trivia is actively putting professional encyclopedias out of business. The longer fear is that once these professional outfits are downed, they can never come back.

Between FieryAngel's blog posts, David Shankbone's replies in this thread, Andrew Keen's writing, those two Jon Awbrey posts and Moulton's definitions above, we got a pretty good circle of arguments that illustrate a whole element of Wikipedia we don't hear enough of.

I'm tempted to call this one more aspect of Wikipedia's formal content neutrality: it doesn't matter what you know, or what you create, but only how you conduct yourself relative to the rules and norms of the project.

These rules and norms, though arcane to outsiders, are much easier to learn than becoming an expert in any scholarly subject. Six months on Wikipedia and you can be made an administrator. In a year or two, you can be a checkuser and/or an arbitrator.

To privilege experts - including amateur ones - would mean disenfranchising all these people, or at least significantly degrading that franchise by handing the real leadership of the project - overt editorial responsibility - over to another class.

If you are talking about the advertized rules and norms, then what you say is total bull.

If you are talking about the actual hidden agendas, then you have just defined a cult.

Jon

Nonetheless, there are plenty of otherwise amateurish and immature editors who are gifted at wiki-lawyering and gaming the system. I couldn't begin to compete with them on that front.

This is the real problem: you can't replace experience by process. People who are considered to be experts are considered so because they, at one point or the other, have "delivered the goods". They've written the definitive biography about somebody, or established the "correct" catalog of a certain composer's works, or they are the person who can look at a painting and can say whether or not it painted by a certain artist or not.

You don't just get that kind of knowledge by using bookshelf references for six months. You only get that way after years of dealing with in the ins and outs of a subject, going through boxes in archives, talking to others, arguing (that's when you really see what you know and what you don't!), writing about your subject. It's a very long process and you cannot make it go any faster than the time that it takes.

I am reminded of another situation in which I sat on a European arts commission to discuss aspects of discrimination against female musicians in European arts circles. There were several twenty-something members of the panel, but everyone quite naturally wanted to elect the fifty-something woman who was the universally known expert on the subject of women and music to be the committee chair. The twenty-somethings got quite irate and started in with the idea of "age discrimination" and the fact that someone who was in their age group should be elected to the chair, as a matter of course. The discussion got quite violent until somebody asked the right question: "what have you done?". And the answer was, of course, "not much yet, I'm only twenty". Then the same question was asked to the fifty-something woman and she gave her credentials. The situation was then resolved.

The point being is that you can't replace experience and artificially creating some sort of credentials such as "wiki-accreditation for reporters" is not a solution. It's going to be seen among those who have the credential as being the equivalent of monopoly money, and quite rightly so.

The obvious solution is to get the experience, to do the work and then honestly claim the credential. You can't skip any of the steps, the Internets not withstanding.

From the typical administrator's/vested contributor's point of view, they have the needed credentials: experience editing (and gaming) Wikipedia. They've paid their dues, while the real-life expert who arrives and begins arguing with them has not. They can ask, well, what have you done? You only have fifteen edits.

It's deceptive to say, as we often hear, that the Wikipedia is uninterested in credentials. What they've done is substitute their own set for that of the real world.

Who cares if you're a tenured professor at Oxford? We don't recognize class distinctions here. User:NewbieEater is the Grand Poobah Lotus Dragon of the Third Circle of Acolytes, and you're not even an initiate. That's what counts.

I'd agree that some measure, "well, what have you done for the project?" is an appropriate consideration, people who have done good work over a period off time should be empowered (at least provisionally) regardless of previous credentials, but it's taken way too far, and to the exclusion of any other considerations. No one even asks if it might not be a good idea to have a few real-life (non-anonymous and verified) academic and journalistic editors and publishers on the Arbitration Committee, much less proposes any scheme to set this in motion.

All well said.

Which is why Wikipedia operates more as a Pythonesque MMPORG rather than an authoritative encyclopedia.

That sounds like a very good blog post indeed. I'll look forward to reading that.

Okay, this makes me wonder if somebody didn't realize that he was maybe going a bit overboard with all of the personal photos...

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's wait and see what's in the blog post....

That said, this seems a bit...provocative...to say the least.

So, you're making a deal with this PR firm about what is said about their clients on WP, David? Could you explain a bit further??

Who's D-L? Anyway, I saved them for posterity.