Every effective confidence game combines two parts, the Bait and the Hook. The precise manner of their combination and joint operation can be difficult to tease apart in your mind, but without both parts the trick don't stick and the sting don't zing.

The Bait is something — seems to be something — that you naturally want, and the Angler makes you a promise of it — seems to make you a promise of it — by dangling appearances before your eyes.

The Hook is something — something Real beneath the Bait — it moves the Angle forward and makes it work on the Mark, very often calling on the Mark's liability to fall for a particular style of rhetorical mechanism or a specious type of logical premiss.

Let us spend some time trying to see how the Wikipedia Angle is put together — and what we can do to get ourselves and other Fish in our School off the Hook.

Jonny

So this could be how you whenever you edit an article, you have to watch it for the rest of your life to make sure the edit sticks, or admit you wasted your time because your edit will eventually be removed.

Bait: [edit]. Or at least it was initially, when few knew what Wikipedia was (in fact, we're now approaching a stage where 99% of 'test' edits can be presumed to be vandalism, as everyone knows what Wikipedia is).

Now, the bait is really dependent upon the user. And the nature of Wikipedia means that the user creates their own bait, whether it be the desire to correct a fact, or more likely "correct" a point of view.

What Is This ??? —

• Left Overs Friday (LOF) ???
• Clean Out The Archives Golden Oldies Revival Philm Phest (COTAGORPP) ???

For quite a while now I've been snapping up all the videos of conman movies I could find, all on a hunch that Wikipedia is phundamentally some kinda Mimbo Jimbo quasi-religious cult cum confidence game @ ⊥.

But it's Friday, fer Pete's sake, and I'm hopping the next train outta Jimbostown for Margaritaville post haste !!!

Jonny

I've been going through the archives to add more to my list of http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=11547&hl= Why not to donate to The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia).






It is a lot of Mimbo Jimbo.

Something broke with that link — I fixed it.

It's post # 47442, which you can find out by clicking on the "Post # Whatever" in the northeast corner of the post, so you can link to it this way : {post=47442}Why not to donate to The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia){/post}, except with square brackets instead of curly braces.

Jonny

Interesting comparison Jonny. The "bait" is that the encyclopædia is free and that anyone can edit it. The "hook" is that the encyclopædia is not really free, and there is an Established Government Clique behind the "freedom". It is not really free because of the ruling class, or AdministraItors, Bureaucrats, Overseers (I don't think they use the proper grammatical form to avoid comparisons with the slaves and "overseer", the colored foreman, or anything else, they say "oversights" for these users), and Checkuserers.

I was studying this pretty intently earlier in the year — read a few chapters of my old psych books again, and looked up some papers about confidence games on the web, but mostly just dug up all the dvds I could find on cons, short and long, as that was more fun.

Will track down some of the old Revue threads and maybe make a Must See viewing list later this weekend.

Jonny

Jonny Cache's Fave Flicks from the Archives of United Con Artists

{{STUB}}

Just to remind me to work on this later …

Jonny