There's an interesting exchange going on, over on the talk page for the Brandt article right about now. Essentially, User:WAS_4.250 is trying to convince the WP anti-privacy zealots that a reasonable standard that WP might use in a limited opt-out policy is, essentially, "no first biography" - in other words, Wikipedia articles should not be the primary or only web-based source of information about a living person, if the person objects to it.

This exchange has convinced me (as if I needed convincing) that Josh "User:JoshuaZ" Zelinsky is not a human being at all, but rather some sort of cold, emotionless AI construct, probably programmed by the Yale CS department as some sort of bizarre social experiment. (This would, of course, indicate that the Hivemind entry on Josh is probably incorrect, and that "Zelinsky" is just a cover story of some kind.)

Here's what WAS says:

...And here's Josh's reaction:

So not only does "Zelinsky" have no heart, soul, human emotions, or spell-checker, his program isn't even coded to recognize the existence of the concepts involved. If it doesn't relate to some sort of "policy" or (Wikipedian) "logic," it simply doesn't compute!

Since he's one of the leading voices in the invidious "Keep Brandt" campaign these days, I guess we won't have much chance of seeing this whole business end until the Yale CS department releases JoshuaZ 2.0, and even then there's no guarantee that they'll have added a properly-working "human-like emotion" subroutine by then.

So hard to find good programmers these days... Meanwhile, it's been fairly obvious in the past that WAS 4.250 doesn't like us much here at WR, but at least he/she is up to version 4 with a couple of service packs. Must be from Harvard, then?

Going through his contribution history I note that he recently stood up to SlimVirgin. I think he is very independently minded.

Oh yeah? Then how do you explain the fact that he blocked the other guy too?

Besides, Slimmy was chiding both of those editors - it looks more like a case of "Josh" doing her bidding than anything else.

This is one of the first, the few, the doomed to be fuzzed-over from the get-go intelligent ideas that I've seen coming out of this whole — words fail me here, as I'm too lazy to look up the spelling of brew-haha yet again, much less go hunting up Roget Robot for some less hack-kneed expression — anyway, where was I? Oh yes, bone idea.


Let's not be knocking Artificial Intelligence Constructs (AIC's) — as you never know who yer talking to these days — and when it comes to the more bizarre brain-preps of Yale, well, another Franken-stoned one has JZ beat peripherals-down.

Jonny

You're joking, right?

To continue ...

Re: "If it doesn't relate to some sort of "policy" or (Wikipedian) "logic", it simply doesn't compute!"

Actually, Righteous Brothers tunes aside, one of the Big Bugs in the programming of your average Wikipedibot is that it hasn't yet been escalated to the level of formal operations (a la Piaget) that would allow it to grasp an abstract concept like Policy. Of course, they are not alone in that, as discussions here will now and then illustrate. But then, at least us DejaVuBots are trying to evolve a conscience.

Jonny