Every now and then I get a fine notion to try and write something longer than a snippet or two about Wikipedia — but the scene of the slime is so depressing that I usually find an excuse to do something less futile before I get a snippet or two past the working title.

Anyway … I'll use this space to collect some raw materials that I might try to rework over time.

Once we get past the distraction of content and start seeing the system of practices, it becomes obvious that Wikipedia is spreading a form of learned dysfunctionality through the regions of society it touches.

Jon

The interesting question is whether we can find examples where people have taken Wikipedia thinking and exported it to the real world, and what the effects are.

We see touches of it here, understandably, where people expect us to behave by Wikipedian standards. Where have we seen examples in the wider world? Jimbo tries to pollute thinking in his little homilies about what he thinks is right and wrong, but nobody takes too much notice of him. I've seen some in the blogs, but I don't think that counts.

I've not come across a Wikipedian in real life, so it is hard to tell how bad they are in reality. Fortunately, I get the impression that the worst ones are so addicted they rarely surface to impinge on reality.

First off, I think we have to recognize that the sources of Wikipedism have long been present in the wider culture and that Wikipedia is really no more than one of several Braindead Megaphones — its cocoonspiritor Google being another flagrant example — that amplifies their native dysfunctions to viral proportions.

To some degree, Wikipedism derives from the Mindless Connectivism that has periodically overrun the fields of AI and Cognitive Science, under one name or another, since the 1940s. The latest revival cranked itself up again in the late 1980s and — for reasons we might examine — refuses to die the justly deserved death of its previous flare-ups.

I guess the next question would have to be, “Why Is That?”

Jon Awbrey

Obvious question?

Is the Wikipedia not just a symptom rather than the cause of an increasing malaise?

Yes, I know "state of the nation" or "the young people of today" are sure signs of late middle age ... but I think it hard to argue against a decline in young people's mental ability to focus, a decline in educational standards and abilities, and an increase in anti-social tendencies brought about by increasingly short-lived and intense 'blipvert' type media and entertainment stimulation.

• Are there any studies about such effects on society?

Of course, whereas in the past, such futile expressions would have limited to the young, I guess what is new about the collusion between internet access and the Wikipedia is that it also gives voice and influence to entirely different marginal sub-sections of society who would never have been allowed influence before.

I am painting with a broad inaccurate brush here and thinking of pub bores, menopausal ladies, cranky old men ... older, marginalized, probably under-employed and "unsuccessful" individuals that prior to Web 2.0 would have had no voice whatsoever in society beyond their arm's reach.

And expression also to their cranky, bigoted, obtuse, short-sighted manners.

In short, individuals who one would have avoided interaction in real life with, and had the ability just to walk away from or avoid?


I mean, there is no psychological screening of contributors to the Wikipedia whatsoever ... how do we even know they are taking their medication!?!

Personally, I never experienced any "mentoring" or any "teaching" at all in the puerile bun fight that the Porno-pedia is.

Is half the problem not that it is like a college or school but without any structure or responsible adults involved?

What would one expect if one handed the key of the college over to a bunch of school kids and unemployed and let them get on with it themselves?

No, I'm not really talking about ordinary order of phenomena that you enumerated above.

I'm trying to identify the specific factors in the design of wikioid media that have been dragging discourse down over the last ten years among people who were already IT literate.

Jon Awbrey

Teh Wikis are the first Web thingies that tap into our baboon-like defense of The Territorial Imperative. Formerly, you have to do Stupid Wars With the Nextdoor Neighbors (or some other Nation) to get any taste of that. And it required weapons and led to bad consequences. But now, behold-- it's online. It's available to the person instead of the nation. WW I, for you.

I know, I know, you'll say we have shared on-line games for that, and MMORPG-ification. But those suckers re-set. The same guy isn't the top of the Pacman scorecard heap year after year after year: JIMBO 68,654. On WP, it never re-sets. It cannot be erased. Hill 62 is there to be taken again and again and again, forever. And if you think you OWN it, somebody's always sapping under your walls and trenches.

Well, at a bare minimum that would help to explain why Wikipornia is so packed with pin-ups of Naked Naked Apes, but I'm still not sure that we've got to the root of devolution yet.

But maybe there's a clue in that bit about Homo faber sappiens — the fact that any ∑IT of knolledge, any WikiWalingWall that you trench and re-trench around it, any Wiki-Pile that you bring to the WP:POINT of becoming critical — they're all so easily undermined, they're all so fragile, like syndromic china.

Jon

I couldn't fail to disagree less.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/...6/cantlive.html

As Emily says:

I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sevres pleases,
Old ones crack.



I think she was talking of WR in this verse:


They'd judge us-how?
For you served Heaven, you know,
Or sought to;
I could not,



--Milton

I spent a century in Amħerst one year,
And I can tell you what I learned there:
Her spirit still haunts its sacred groves
And its ancient back alleys late at night.
They say she didn't get out much, but
I know better.

Jon Awbrey
30 May 2010