Here's a Big Picture question that gradually formed in my mind over a weekend's half-hearted sampling of the mindless particularism that has become the Revue of late —

One of the effects of the underlying Randroidism of Wikipediot Culture is a never-ending battle among various factions to pin the Badge Of Objectivity (WP:BOO) on their respective POVs.

Your assignment — if you choose to accept it — is as follows:

• Explain how the constant contest for WP:BOO leads to
  Wikipedia's Fundamentally Uncivil Culture (WP:FUC).

In 100 K words or less, please …

Jon Awbrey

I don't know if it leads to it at such - maybe the BOO is just a symptom of competing rhetoric games, as in most other public domains. I'm objective and rational - you're a silly subjective cranky idiot sort of thing.

My own focus on claims to objectivity is because as you know, the issue is discussed at length in social science. To see WP ers like Guy Chapman claim objectivity while engaging in blatantly partisan behaviour astounded me when I first come up against Wikipedia - though the fact it did perhaps indicates my own level of naievite at the time, about WP and its contributors. I don't know why- but I thought that, if WP was demanding standards of NPOV etc. they might have had at least a rigourous discussion somewhere about claims to objectivity and the problems of these, feminist academic scholarship on this, social construction of partial knowledge etc. Silly me!

Epistemology and Aesthetics are not among Wikipedia's strong points.

Nor are they particularly salient here on W-R, either.

I know the feeling. Coming through several decades of contemporary conversation on the aims of inquiry, belief in relation to conduct, communities of interpretation, critical thinking, cross-cultural diversity of perspectives, fallibilism, indexicality, knowledge representation, reflective praxis, situated learning, and so on — I guess I just imagined that all these themes formed the common background of our times. So when I first banged up against the contrary elements in Wikipedia I can tell from the things I wrote back then that it looked to me like isolated bits of backwardness, nothing more.

Well, that was then, this is now. Now we know that Wikipedism is a degenerative condition, a retrograde eddy in the stream of collective consciousness. I suppose humanity will survive — but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work on how to minimize the collateral dumbage in the mean time.

Jon Awbrey

Interim Palliative Care for the Wounded


I recommend music therapy.

Turn to Page DCLXVI of Your Hymnuls and Sing —

♫♪ Nero Thy G∗d To Thee ♪♫

But not to me …

Ja Ja

"Explain how the constant contest for WP:BOO leads to
Wikipedia's Fundamentally Uncivil Culture (WP:FUC)."

As you seem to imply, it seems, in this version of "NPOV", whoever has the most power in the system, can say that "I am the most NPOV", and then enforce their view/NPOVness. This seems to be done to a point of not just, "I am human too, I do have biases that may unconsciously affect my actions" but to the point, of where it really becomes sort of gross, for lack of a better word.

_So he may be fundamentally OK with incivility among the bureaucracy, he doesn't care, or else he just doesn't know how to stop it._

It may be that he ultimately feels/believes that he is _the most NPOV_. He has enforced it since the beginning through the mechanisms that exist, and filtered the same attitude down through the chosen/_semi_-elected leadership.

That seems to be a big part of it.

I was mulling this over while I sampled the threads on Animal Rites and CiteBorgs and several others that I forget already, and I find myself asking over and over — What keeps Wikipediots from researching and writing articles the way normal scholars do?

I mean, really, what's so confounded complicated about writing things like "A asserts X", and "B believes Y", and "C's argument-evidence-experiment is regarded among demographic-discipline D as showing that Z"?

Why are Wikipediots so desperate to arrogate, not just the ex cathedra seal of approval for their personal points of view, but the illusion of an authority that cannot be questioned — if only because they hide the agenda and the audit trail behind a screen of blue smoke and mirrors?

Jon Awbrey

I don't think we're done with this one, but this is just to note that surely parts of Reliable Sources Redux were also in mind? Mssrs Roe and Clutch make some decent observations there, though you are impatient with them.

My own answer strikes me as inadequate, but this deserves more thought.

Anything more demanded than supplied is likely to be a source of human conflict — the more intense the desire the more risk there is that civil conduct and conviviality will fall among the first casualties.

But why is the Badge Of Objectivity a commodity like that?

It doesn't sound at first shot like anything anyone would get all that worked up about. Is it all people who desire it, or only some? And what would make the strivers thereof go the lengths they go to seize it, by hook or by crook?

Jon Awbrey