This exchange just makes my blood boil :

Quoting without comment, as it needs no explanation:



How can these smug little people look at themselves in the mirror?

Words fail me....

contacting amnesty international with details would seem a much better use of the open proxy. i dont agree with kesh's response in many ways. The simple answer is if posting on wikipedia is going to get you locked up for 3 years then it's probably not a very good idea to post. Some idiot will come along and probably delete what you risked 3 years of your life for anyway.

I agree with Kesh. It was nice of him to bother to respond to that guy's query rather than simply ignoring it, which is what I would have done.

It's not Wikipedia's problem that life sucks. If you can't edit Wikipedia because your government won't let you, take it up with your government. It's not our problem. It may seem harsh to say that to the questioner, but it's the truth, even if the truth hurts.

AI is just a lobby to other agencies in the west or to put pressure on the governments involved. They probably know all about it, anyway, but can't do anything as they have no powers except to inform other organizations with some ability to act, or to raise people's awareness of what's happening.

Or that's how I understand it, and as a teen I sat with other members of AI sending Christmas cards to political prisoners to cheer them up, which probably didn't get to the individual prisoners anyway sometimes. That's how influential our actions where, that and the org perhaps reporting to government what they know of what's happening.



It's good to get people from other country's perspectives in articles etc though.

We used to send them to Russian dissidents who weren't in jail but were closely monitored, recorded delivery with receipt required. My aunt went out and visited some of these dissidents, and very grateful they were for the cards.

Hey, you're forgetting one thing: Wikipedia claims that they're doing it for the poor kid in Africa..

You can't have that and this; the two cannot be reconciled.

What I'm seeing here is that the person playing the Wikipedia Multiplayer Online game is annoyed because reality is rearing its ugly head; there's no reason that some of the WP propaganda doesn't get to the third and fourth worlds and there's no reason that certain people want or need to believe that this propaganda is sincere.

Well, this looks awfully like yes, Virginia, there is NO SANTA CLAUS, so grow up and get over it..

Reality, definitely.

But this kind of reality needs to be remembered the next time they try the poor child in Africa routine at the next fundraiser.....

Once again, Wikipedia Review users are pushing the POV that "Wikipedia Is Evil!!!!", even when this requires the cognitive dissonance of using contradictory reasons to support it. In this thread, they're evil because they don't allow the complete anonymity of proxy editing. In other threads, they're evil because they allow any degree of anonymous/pseudonymous editing at all (and this justifies the likes of Brandt to actively attempt to "out" the editors). Anything goes, as long as it "proves" that Wikipedia Is Evil And Must Be Destroyed.

Look: read what the IP wrote. Read it. Is there any reason why it shouldn't be believed?

If it is true, that isn't it worth a little more vandal fighting, if it advances the cause of free speech?

Oh, yes: but Wikipedia isn't about about Free Speech, is it? It's not about knowledge either.

What is it about, Dan?

Can you say Soylent Green is people, Dan?

...and before you ask me what that has to do with anything, why don't you try to answer that question yourself??

People from the 3rd world have actually been posting on wikiepdia for an awfully long time, pretty much since its inception. We even have admins in the third world. Shock horror I know but true all the same

They have rich people in the Third and Fourth World too....they also have people who like to avoid conflicts. I know people from the third and fourth world who have houses in Saint Tropez, personally. That doesn't change this one bit.

You're missing the point, Squeaky....

Wikipedia Review does not hold to one goal or belief. Reviewers here have different ideas and different views on Wikipedia. What is bad to one may be good for another.

Not necessarily so, in other threads people have said that those supporting anonymity say that it enables people in China or other regimes where they could get trouble for sharing what they know to contribute, and otherwise they could be in danger. This was countered by saying that most people aren't in that position. Which implies that for those few that are, anonymity could be understood. Or so "Some argue."

There is really no rational reason for someone to edit Wikipedia in a way that would get him incarcerated.

And yes, I do live in a third world country.

There is also no way of telling whether the anon was not a shill, being paid by the National Endowment for Democracy to pillory some Third World government that was behind on its debt payments. Ever notice how the ones that pay on schedule never seem to be accused of human rights violations?

There are third world countries which are democratic and tolerate free speech. I can't imagine many people in say Botswana or Guyana being afraid of arrest if they post openly on Wikipedia. Not all third world countries are like that.

Indeed they are not all like that, my point I think is that it isn't third world countries that are unfree it is certain countries that are unfree, 80% of the world lives in the third world apparently and in spite of China being so vast, the number living in unfree countries tends to be much smaller

I think the real shame is that the free idiots who have abused the proxy system for their game playing have brought it into such disrepute it is difficult to see how proxies can be safely used for a worthwhile cause.*

I get a horrible image of some poor chap typing away on his refurb'd 486SX/20 completing his magnum opus, via an ancient 300 baud modem and as he presses edit for the last time, up pops Raul with his revert and ban hammer, the editor and edits never again to see the light of day, his only epitaph being "Indef block, suspected sock of offspring of Jon Awbrey and Mrs Moulton. I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

*Used in the sense of vaguely positive but not worth the experience being hung by the goolies, or even the comfy chair.

A bit of a non-sequitor, but there is no more third world

The first world was capitalist. The second communist. The third world was the ROW.

Now it is the "developing" and the former "first" is developed, or OECD.

(unless you count Vietnam, and Cuba and North Korea as a "world", which really no one does)

Perhaps Jimbo should remember that there are lots of dusty little kids in America too, I've spoken to quite a few Americans who suggest that Deliverance is not so far from the truth. I'm sure there is a little bit of 3rd world in every country. Except Monaco. Except Monaco and The Vatican. I can't spell Lichtenstein so I'll give up with that line of thought.

Oh yeah. But try explaining that to someone in the 3rd world (non-lol).

The idea that poverty exists in America is not credible to many, many people. They think that the country is rich, so of course is everyone in it.

Technically, none of those are countries. Monaco is a principality, and technically get's lumped into France, like Andorra gets lumped into Spain. The Vatican is a city-state. Lichtenstein is a principality, and gets lumped into Switzerland. A lot of lumping.

The no-poverty thing goes more in Scandinavia. But then there's the no rich thing to balance it.

I think America probably suffers more unmitigated poverty and social disadvantage than most, if not all, advanced nations. Relative to other countries in the West, America is a very harsh place to be poor.

This of course pales in the face of the kind of poverty poor nations in Africa endure.

Also many people to the south of America face grim poverty and there is simply not the infrastructure available in America and the developed world nor are the wages remotely similar, though the small middle class and tiny rich elite both live well as well as their counterparts in the west

What's advanced? Compared to the old European 15? Or the new European 20-something, where it's hard too. Russia? Hungary? Poland? Come on. Mexico?

Everywhere it is harsh to be poor. It's just that in some countries there is more of a safety net. It's also harder to get business started. Or to become rich if you weren't born that way. Apples and oranges.

You can get ahead in America. You just have to have 2 or 3 things set up. Reasonable parenting. Values on education. Ability to study. Work Ethic. And you can swing it. Not so in lots of other countries.

Then there's Africa, where you might wind up spending 5 hours a day toting water.

At the very real risk of sounding ignorant, I always wondered why many people in undeveloped nations live 10 or 15 miles from the nearest water source.

No more daft than wondering why people live there at all.

Often though the answer is either:

- there was water but drought or mismanagement has destroyed the water supply.
- over-population forces people to live where they can

Africa's problems defy common sense at times. You'd think that would leave plenty to go around the rest of the world...

For pedants who learned their world history in the 1960s - Old World = Europe and Russia, New World = Americas (and Australia & New Zealand) Third World = abandoned colonies of the Old World left in the shit.

The idea of the First and Second World categories is a back construction from the notion of a Third World as listed above - as such they frequently don't make much historical sense.

Whatever - the chances of a not English as a first language, secret police threatened editor getting a sympathic hearing from En.WP Admin, is as likely as getting a useful response from an ATT&T helpline.

AF

The common sense solution to Africa's problems is that it should adopt the patterns that the successful parts of the world have done: 1) Attention to individual rights in the sphere of politics, and 2) worship of science, technology, and reward for innovation, in the sphere of economics.

Africa's a brutal place, with no water in the North and tropical diseases in the rest. To survive, a population of more than a minimal hunter-gatherer number, needs to have good politics and good epistemology, and in most of Africa, they presently have neither. Africa's twin problems there (lack of respect for expertise, lack of respect for a bill of rights) are rather like (in fact, almost exactly like) Wikipedia's basic two problems. Which is more than ironic.

It would be nice if the West's message to Africa was totally on-tune: "You need to have individual rights" "You need to worship technology and science." But it's not. Instead they get a mismash of victimology 101: the Left will help you blame anybody but yourself and your attitudes for your troubles.

Victimology 101 includes fat servings of the ideas that 1) Africa's problems were visitied upon it by the West, 2) Africa never had any problems of its own before the West got there and screwed it up, 3) Africa always had a high civilization in every way, from government to science, and all the West has done is perverted it, and 4) (Perhaps most pernicious), the idea that the success of Western democracies and their science is due to rape of places like Africa, and has nothing whatever to do with the intellectual rise of Western Civilization, starting with the Greek philosophy and Mediterranean trade. Yeah, all of what we used to call Western Civilization 101 turns out to be just ancient colonialist apologetics. Pay no attention to it. Enjoy your malaria and HIV and TB. And that (black) guy with the AK-47 between you and the water? Blame the white man for him; you'll feel better.

You'd think that institutions of higher learning would be trying to help Africa with basic tools of government and science. They aren't (exception: people like Jeffrey Sachs, MD-- but he doesn't come from the African Studies Dept or English Dept). Higher academics are busy undermining all that, all they can. Science and good government is leaking into Africa slowly, but not from universities. It's leaking in from ordinary educated folks from the West, doing their normal jobs. And from Africans who go to the West for an education, and somehow aren't eaten by the neo-Marxists, and instead manage to learn something about agriculture and tropical disease and the Bill of Rights.

Good luck, dark continent. We're rooting for you. And did I mention Wikipedia? It's a caricature of you. Don't look to it for help.

Jimbo claims that. He doesn't speak for me in that regard (and I'd wager he doesn't speak for Dan either, although he's welcome to chime in himself). I do it as a hobby. Probably I should be spending the time I spend on Wikipedia doing something for the poor kid in Africa, but that's true of most of our hobbies.



I've certainly never heard anyone claim 2 or 3, and I hang out with a fair number of international development hippies. As for 4, why can't it be both? Yeah, the intellectual underpinnings of western society, from the Greeks through to the Enlightenment and beyond, have been helpful in developing our present standard of living. So, strangely enough, has been having a portion of the world's population willing to produce goods for us at an exploitatively low price.

As for 1, well, I'm an unrepentant advocate of that one, I'm afraid, at least for a good portion of the third world's problems. For such a fan of individual freedom, you seem awfully ready to discount the notion that forcible denial of said freedoms for generations does a country any harm.

(Sorry for participating in dragging this thread off-topic - I have a lower tolerance for people saying dumb things about poverty in the developing world than I do for people saying dumb things about Wikipedia, it appears. Not that all, or even most, of what's said here about Wikipedia is dumb.)

I, for one, am not doing what I do on Wikipedia for the poor kids in Africa, or for Jimbo... I'm doing it because I find it a useful information resource and want to make it better, and find it reasonably fun doing so despite having to deal with some jerks (who are found both on WP itself and on WP criticism sites like this). If others get benefit from it (whether they're poor kids in Africa, or [probably more often] rich kids in America [who have better Internet access in general]), that's nice, but I don't depend on it. If Jimbo manages to profit from it somehow, fine for him... the free license ensures that he can't make it proprietary to him in a way that excludes others from doing other things with it without paying him.

You need more exposure to what passes for African Studies these days:

http://members.aol.com/afriforum/colonial.htm

Just read a few of these links.

(Sorry for participating in dragging this thread off-topic - I have a lower tolerance for people saying dumb things about poverty in the developing world than I do for people saying dumb things about Wikipedia, it appears. Not that all, or even most, of what's said here about Wikipedia is dumb.)

Poverty in the "developing world" of Africa is much the same as poverty in pre-Columbian Americas. It's the same-old same-old of neolithic people killing and eating each other, crappy technology, malnutrition, famine, overuse of resources, disease, and war, war, and more war. All before anybody ever saw a white man. See Diamonds' Guns, Germs, and Steel, which you must have read when it came out at first. Diamond is not pointing fingers, but he's really not pointing fingers at ANYBODY, including the West. It's not that these people in the now-developing people were dumb-- they just had a bad place to live in, and never had the chance to figure out a better culture. The didn't get oppressed by the west any worse than they were already oppressing themselves. On the contrary, they finally got Western technology. And what did they do with radio and automatic rifles when they finally could use them to govern themselves? Rwanda. The Sudanese civil war and Darfur. All these places have learned to blame the West for this, and they're doing so (Where's the UN? WHere's the UN?). A lot of good it's doing them. What do they need the colonialist UN for?

We see pre-Western civiliation in the Americas only through things like Anasazi cannibal pots and Aztec skull trophy racks, Mayan sacraficial cenotes and and what we found out about the Terra del Fuegans or the Caribs or (in Africa) the Zulu when we first contacted them (not pretty). That's the human condition in the absense of Western tech, unless you happen to be lucky enough to live on a nice big river like the Nile or some of the fertile cresent, or you get to fish from a tropical island (ie, your real estate is some of the very choicest and rarest on the planet). Until we can get the African Studies profs in their sinecured jobs at our universities to figure this out, we're going nowhere. They're pointing back at a utopia which never existed, and they're not helping.