I post here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/vaknin-a...-wikipedia.html about Sam Vaknin and his recent dispute with Joseph Reagle.

I hadn't heard of Reagle. He is an academic (well, a computer scientist), and seems highly favourable toWikipedia. He is publishing a book about Wikipedia soon. Has anyone else heard of him? The Wikipedia-tagged entries in his blog are here

http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/index.html

This sort of confirms a suspicion. People from an IT background or a computing degree tend to like Wikipedia. Those with a background in humanities, don't.

I'm not well qualified to judge. However,I suspect that WP computing/IT articles are by and large of a much higher standard than humanities ones. That's for the obvious reason that you get far more well-qualified IT geeks editing seriously than humanities ones. Also, IT people are less likely to be upset by sloppy English than experts in say English literature.

Wrong. It is for the same reason geeks play other video games in disproportionate numbers.

Nope, but I know MIT Press, his publisher, and it is safe to say that this book will get near-zero in the way of publicity (most U.S. academic presses do a horrid job in promoting their titles).

The concept of the book is utterly absurd: "Despite the social unease over its implications for individual autonomy, institutional authority, and the character (and quality) of cultural products, Wikipedia's good faith collaborative culture has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the century-old pursuit of a universal encyclopedia." That sounds like something that Steve Smith would plagiarize write or something that the WMF would pay someone to write.

Reading his blog, it appears that Reagle has purchased the foolishness of what Wikipedia could have been and doesn't see what it really is. The only genuine surprise will be whether it is inferior in depth and scope to Dalby's misguided work.

On Science Friday on NPR, host Ira Flatow suggested that the time has come to introduce another term to supplant "geek", and he invited his listeners to make suggestions.

My suggestion was "systems thinkers" (after Simon Baron-Cohen's notion that people with Asperger's Syndrome are "systematizers").

Subjects which are amenable to systematic thinking are well-suited to being written by systems thinkers.

And while I believe that subjects in the Humanities can be given a systematic treatment, they are much more likely to be written by people who are not particularly systematic in their thinking or writing.

I think "dweeb" has a better ring to it.

You could shorten "systems thinkers" to "stinkers."

Here ya' go.

Oh Moulton - have you succumbed to such wiki-ideals that you, and all your infinite brain-power, really use quotes in such a defiant way? Are we not better than that, and taught that punctuation belongs within all parameters?
"Love ya dood".

I never can make up my mind on which of those standards to adopt in any given context.

Joseph Reagle is the featured thinker in the latest blog post by WMF Executive Director, Sue Gardner...


Sue then goes on to discuss the challenge of Consensus Decision Making (CDM).

The third comment to Sue's blog is from Joseph Reagle.

My own comment is in the moderation queue...

So it was you!

Well, at least now we know who to blame …

Jon

Several of us here live in the Quaker State. Also, my church happens to embrace several former Quakers amidst the congregation. I live only a couple miles from the Birmingham Friends Quaker Meeting, erected in 1763 and utilized as a hospital after 9-11.

(And by 9-11, I mean the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777.)

Sue Gardner is no Quaker.

Quaker State?

It's just another source of 40-Weight Snake Oil to her.

Jon

I just looked at his latest paper in preprint here

http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/06/reagle-nr...llab-norms.html

This gave me a severe attack of 'cognitive dissonance', i.e. the disturbing and disorientating effects of meeting a view of reality that is so different to your own that your whole system of values and judgment is called into question. Is he really talking about Wikipedia?

And I hate that whole social sciences style of writing (Moulton, please don't confuse this kind of stuff with the 'humanities'). E.g. this



Essentially a series of citations from (probably) equally vacuous papers without any attempt at serious analysis or thought.

I commented on his blog here http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/nrhm-be-nice .

Let's go to the video tape...


Notably lacking from the bibliographic references is the essential work of Suzette Haden Elgin, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, Dorset Press, 1980, and the sequel, More on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, Prentiss-Hall, 1983.

With respect to the motivation and emotion attached to "Defensive Communication," let us not overlook this observation from Sam Vaknin:


Alas, Joseph Reagle evidently overlooked that (or perhaps bumptiously brushed it aside).

The adopted position is that of 'visitor from Mars' acting as non judgemental observer, with a subsequent sleight of hand effected by shoe horning the 'observations' into concepts pronounced upon by authorities who fit the perspective of the observer. The self same approach is taken by many 'scoiologists of religion' when writing about cults. Social Science - isn't science, its practioners really should bite the bullet and stop the pretence of aping the true sciences and instead accept that, whatever the narrow political nuances of Critical Theory and its identification with one school of (social) philosophy, intellectual endevour demands a Critical approach. Sociology, armed with the (notional) excavation tools of archaeology can achieve useful results, but the bland custard produced by Reagle and his kind just serves as soft marketing for their chosen subjects.


A.virosa

That's a clever trope. I'll have to give that a try sometime.

That's it.

Bland Custard's Last Stance

Let's hope that, going forward, Joseph Reagle adds a little more spice to his analysis and kicks it up another notch.

Why would you think it would be anything other than vacuous twaddle? He's an academic computer scientist, that is all you need to know. The entire discipline descended into twaddle of one sort or another several years ago. I believe they gave up on the 'science' bit vis-a-vis numbers a decade or more ago, and they have since all resorted to psychobabble.

Sure, but to be fair, I don't think he was suggesting it wouldn't be something other than vacuous twaddle. And since he's starting to include the study of Quakers in his academic portfolio, that suggests that he's trying to pass himself off as a social scientist when he really isn't.

Back to the main point though, there's no question that comparing Wikipedia decision-making processes (if you can call them that) to the practices of Quakers is insulting to Quakers. Both Reagle and Sue Gardner should publicly apologize for this, and just be thankful that there probably aren't enough Quakers around to give their cockamamie "theories" much national media attention.

Also, maybe it's time we set up a running blog post here on WR for people to reply to Sue Gardner's blog, since she seems to have discovered that "moderating" comments is a good way to pretend problems don't actually exist.

Hey what arsehole purged the wiki article on the Quakers to remove all references to the Ranters? damn those two groups were once interchangeable:
http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/ranters.html

I'm fairly sure that Abiezer Coppe ended up as a Quaker too.

Looks like it was never in there, at least not for any appreciable length of time - have you seen a version of that article that contained such a reference? (A revision search turned up doodley-squat, I'm afraid.)

Of course, if WP's article on the Ranters (T-H-L-K-D) is accurate, then it might not really belong there - after all, it would be unfair to one group to (negatively?) associate them with a second group that they oppose or disdain, merely because the second group claims an affinity with them. It might be fair to mention such claims in the article about the second group, though, if there is one.

Oh I don't know didn't Fox claim to have converted all the Ranters? Now the group that they were most at odds with were the Muggletonians and I think that animosity went on a for a couple of centuries.

Thence slowly on thro' Laytonstone,
Past many a Quaker's box,—
No friends to hunters after deer,
Tho' followers of a Fox.

But that would mean that some of our Pet WikiPOVists would have to remove anachronistic references to Nazis from the article on Martin Luther —

You sly dog …

Jon