Jonny
Full Version: Wikipedians All Live In A Yellow Submarine
The really nice thing about Wikipedia is that you can always fix your sense of the real world to fit your mindless dedication to the senseless mythology.
Jonny
Jonny
Fascinating. Tell me more.
He could be referring to any number of things, I suppose. For example, we've seen how people justify advancing the "sole founder" myth as fact by essentially agreeing with the idea that the employer should get sole credit for work done by a "hireling," even though demographically speaking they shouldn't be the kind of people who would agree with that.
For another example, I was just listening to an interview with Jimbo in which he claimed that MediaWiki, as a piece of software, "subtly helps" to make the Wikipedia community "a more friendly and civil place." Now, obviously this is completely absurd - indeed, the opposite is true, as MediaWiki deliberately creates a highly contentious environment that uses competition and gamesmanship to drive collaboration. The only way they can have civility is the way they actually do have it - by enforcing civility rules with an iron fist and an always-ready banhammer. But I suspect there are people who believe even that claim, simply because Jimbo says it.
Then there's the whole mythology about how anonymous (or "pseudonymous") identities don't cause the problems they obviously cause (such as anti-expert bias, for example) on a website on which information is presented pseudo-objectively, without specific attribution. That's also absurd, but it's something you pretty much have to agree with in order to advance in the hierarchy.
And so on...
For another example, I was just listening to an interview with Jimbo in which he claimed that MediaWiki, as a piece of software, "subtly helps" to make the Wikipedia community "a more friendly and civil place." Now, obviously this is completely absurd - indeed, the opposite is true, as MediaWiki deliberately creates a highly contentious environment that uses competition and gamesmanship to drive collaboration. The only way they can have civility is the way they actually do have it - by enforcing civility rules with an iron fist and an always-ready banhammer. But I suspect there are people who believe even that claim, simply because Jimbo says it.
Then there's the whole mythology about how anonymous (or "pseudonymous") identities don't cause the problems they obviously cause (such as anti-expert bias, for example) on a website on which information is presented pseudo-objectively, without specific attribution. That's also absurd, but it's something you pretty much have to agree with in order to advance in the hierarchy.
And so on...
QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Fri 31st August 2007, 3:54pm) 
Fascinating. Tell me more.
I'll have to go back and see what I was thinking about on that phateful day last April. It's a pretty generic, Brand X sort of observation, but it may have been incited by Jossi & Mangoe-Papaya's Sci-Fly Phantasmagory on "Wikipedia Is In The Real World" — a piece that continues to be one of the most absoid bits of Swords & Sourceless-Sorry in all of Wikiputia, and that, y'know, is saying a LOT.
Then again, it could've been almost anything …
Take yer pick, Gimli …
Jonny
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