Just dashing off a quick observation here...
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Thu 5th August 2010, 11:06pm)
Jon Awbrey —
QUOTE(Awbrey Self-Quote from CPOV)
The Wikipedia Cult / Focal Problem / Banning
One of the lessons that my teachers pounded into my head over many long years of alio-inculcation was that education and inquiry have as much to do with process as product, as much to do with conduct as content.
Wikipedia, just to take up the current example, begins to look like a very different proposition when we start to examine the reality of practice that prevails in its orbit.
Maybe it would help to focus, one by one, on particular practices that distinguish Wikipedia Culture from other systems that we know?
One practice that is very symptomatic of cults, dogmatic organizations, faith-oriented groups, religions, sects, whatever you want to call them, is the practice of banning, shunning, or excommunicating onetime members of the group, members who were once considered “good faith†participants.
It occurs to me that a collegial and congenial demeanor enhances both the process and the product of a course of inquiry. As Richard Feynman points out, there is a pleasure in finding things out.
But as many of us here on W-R know from bitter experience, there is no pleasure in being thrown out.
Pray tell, what
better practices prevail in the orbits of W-R in general (and the Meta Forum in particular)?
Jon, I am unclear what you seek to learn by adopting, sustaining, and perpetuating the deprecated practice of banning, ejecting, shunning, disregarding, excommunicating, or discarding good faith participants in the inquiry process.
Do you seek to learn a better way of expressing one's displeasure at that unwholesome turn of events?