Wikipedia's aims can be nothing but nefarious, and seem to reflect the arrogance of most Wikipedia fanatics. Their mission seems compatible with that of what I like to call "vulture capitalists". These are people who believe that the interests of corporations and their control of the (human and natural) resources of the world should never be impeded, no matter what the consequences and effects on the planet, human survival, and people's lives in the present and future.

These "vulture capitalists" do not care about people being displaced by their system; what was once public, collectively owned, and shared by people now being controlled by corporations. They have a vision that they wish to fulfill by doing anything for money or companies, and they seek to turn the world into a place where everyone competes for these things, into a dog-eat-dog place where everyone's motive is to gain everything for themselves. This love of selfish greed and utter contempt for altruism is reflected in Wikipedia's motives and their ideology.

This statement is an example of this attitude, by Jimbo Wales himself. Mr. Wales begins with a mission which sounds impeccable, but further down he praises his project and says that he is doing it for "the child in Africa" who can find a "solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him". In other words, giving some poor child some trivial McDonald's version of knowledge, while s/he still rots in poverty. He or she can find a "solution" from the useless wiki knowledge, and while s/he remains starving, gets distracted using Wikipedia like a drug. Their people's culture can be destroyed by Wikipedia, which, like capitalism, seeks to "take back the world". It's funny, neither capitalists nor Wikipedians owned the world in the first place.

Has anyone else noticed this parallel?

--FB

Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.

Jimmy's goals were never so nefarious; he just wanted to be rich. There's absolutely no need to turn him into a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Wikipedia's dysfunctions are completely explainable by a combination of ordinary greed and ordinary stupidity; there is no need to confabulate grand conspiracy theories regarding starving African children; Jimmy just uses them to pull at his prospective donors heartstrings.

I can actually forgive the initial stupidity: I think there are all sorts of problems with Wikipedia today that intelligent people could have failed to anticipate in 2002 or 2003. Even the consensus governance model probably made some sense at that point. It's the ongoing stupidity and unwillingness to deviate from what was apparently written in stone at that point that I find so frustrating.

I stand corrected in regards to the "nefarious" thing, and your post reminds me of something. Jimmy Wales was a stock trader before he was a self-styled "entrepreneur" and webmaster (Bomis, not Wikipedia). It was greed and the desire to have even more money that fueled Wikipedia, merely that some Wikipedians' aims appear nefarious. In addition, Wikipedia was a commercial (.com) site, and remember the controversy on Jimmy's spending of Wikipedia "Foundation" funds?

It does seem that Jimmy uses the "Child in Africa" to appeal to potential donors' emotions.

Jimmy's greedy attitude probably was, at the least, enhanced by his time as a stock trader in Chicago.

The initial post seems to have a socialistic ideology behind it, with a view that the masses need to be protected, for their own good, from the stuff provided by evil capitalists that they might otherwise be sufficiently deluded to want to use. Viva la revolucion!

Myself, I consider the aims of the project perfectly reasonable; the execution, though, has often been screwed-up through human incompetence.

I agree, Sarcasticidealist, that Wikipedia has definitely become worse since it started. In some ways, however, it has become better (i.e., the development of BLP policy), however they still haven't done enough as far as BLP's go, there is still much work to come if they want to remain a project without becoming history. I say that it should be completely destroyed, and then built again, with a new name (because "[Encyclo]pedia" is technically incorrect). As far as the biographies of living persons, they need to do much more than what they have done, which is not successful progress at all. The amount of action they have taken is minimal.

There are articles that push pro-European points of view on history, and "Amerocentric" propaganda which has infested the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" since its founding. These propaganda pieces should be dealt with accordingly.

Dtobias: I'm not a socialist, and prefer not to define myself politically, other than the fact that I'm left-wing, anti-war, and anti-corporate, that and I do see capitalism as something people need to be protected from). The closest ideology to mine would be Council_communism, if that's any hint, but that should be discussed in the Politics forum.

I believe that Jimmy is saying that the "solution" the their "crushing poverty" is knowledge. Where before they had little enough to learn with the one or three books they could afford, that Wikipedia replaces 500 books for the price of an internet connection.

Jimmy doesn't actually believe any of that crap, though. He just says it to get people to "donate" to his castle-building "charity".

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime;
give a man Wikipedia and he gets a list of appearances of fish on Family Guy.

So point them out and write. Where in all this will you find some non-amerocentric pocket of the 'net and a cadre of more non-eurocentric editors to do it from the ground up? It took 8 years to get this far. FWIW I agree with the meagre state of alot of non-first world articles

I don't think that says what you meant for it to say.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of the people associated with Wikipedia (often in high-ranking positions, as Casliber above is) are such terribly ineffective communicators and writers. You'd think that encyclopedia editors would be, in general, at least better than average at producing clear, comprehensible English prose. And yet....

Aha yes, what I meant was 'FWIW I agree with the me that the state of alot of non-first world articles is meagre' ....the perils of multitasking (was on the phone while I was typing...

You're typing to us and ON THE PHONE TOO?

Like to who, your new girlfriend?

Why don't you get back to us when you can REALLY pay full attention to WHO WE ARE.

Brilliant ... absolutely brilliant.

Here is the full quote. It is not his only such quote. The original was about some African girl.

So, given the results to date, what is the estimated trajectory of them banging their heads together to gain sufficient consensus, and polish their written skills, in order to make actually school books?

I look forward to the 'consensus' school books on Japanese-Korean history in around ... oh, 2237 AD.

Usual cultic methods. It always has to be an inflated "global", "the world" ... "the total sum of all The Knowledge". A ridiculous Don Quixote vision to give a sense of false confidence and to make the adherents feel more self-important.

It wasn't stupid, it was naive. The governance model actually made a lot of sense, but it was also vulnerable to certain quite predictable hazards, and the ways to avoid these hazards weren't known to the founders.

The guidelines and policies and theories were actually excellent, as far as they went. But guidelines and policies are routinely ignored, when it suits the active core, and no way was found and implemented to keep the core aligned with the entire community. Essentially, the community is asleep, which is its natural state, for large communities. Only if certain mechanisms exist can large communities awaken and function as coherent, intelligent bodies, absent emergencies. There are successful models from past experience, but those who know them are not welcome. Awakenings and actions under emergency conditions tend to be confused, people overreact. Think Iranian revolution, or Tienanmen Square, or indeed, almost every revolution, historically. Probably community consciousness can't be built by revolution, but only by growth and the establishment of stable synapses.

My sense of Jimbo is that he's stuck. He knows there is a problem, but he doesn't know how to solve it, and when solutions are suggested, he's not actively investigating them, nor does he assign the investigation to someone he trusts. (Busy-ness could explain the former, but not the latter.) He has the power to make changes, but he's aware of the risks, of the tiger he's got by the tail. So he's almost paralyzed.

There is a way out, predicted by theory. It only takes a handful of people to realize it and work for it. I'm not convinced that the handful exists, and certainly they aren't working openly on the problem, if at all. Perhaps it's not important enough. It is, after all, just a wiki.

There are plenty of people who understand the problem, but those people aren't organized, and most of them have become inactive. In this is a clue to the solution.

It's also not clear that he has the unilateral authority to fix anything even if he wants to.

He has the power, if he knew how to use it. It wouldn't be "unilateral," technically, but the decision could be that. He'd need lots of help, but he could get it.

Legal authority is in the hands of the WMF, but I suspect it would cooperate with a coherent plan from Jimbo. For him to just barge in and start using his tools would be not what would work. Rather, he would act to build the structures that would awaken the community. The whole community. (Well, the whole community never awakens, but maybe only ten percent at best. Still, that could be approaching a million editors. How to organize a million editors without creating a new oligarchy? That's the problem, isn't it? A totally generic problem, absolutely not unique to Wikipedia.

The classic solutions are themselves defective and would corrupt the wiki intention. There is a possible experimental solution that would do no harm; if it fails, it would fail gracefully. That solution would eventually evolve naturally, but it might take hundreds of years under present conditions, or maybe longer.

If I had the power over the cancerous sore of the internet -Wikpeidia, I would cut it out and burn it.

Or in plain language, I would

Shut down Wikipedia
Purge the Wikimedia servers
Sell the Domains "Wiki..." and other brick and mortar assets.
Give monies realized to real libraries...

Internet domains are my favourite kind of brick and mortar asset.

It's possible that the WMF would accept his leadership on this point. There is no chance that the community would do so, at least not uniformly enough to meet the unmeetable consensus threshold.

Just redefine consensus. I'm sure it can be done if Jimbo wills it.

Jeez, you almost make it sound like a place I'd want to go back to.

Don't worry: There's still an article about state terrorism by the United States, you still can't get an adequate description of how Bill Ayers, Bernardette Dohrn and the Weather Underground have been considered terrorists by the vast majority of reliable sources, and the ACORN article didn't mention the huge controversy about the organization in its lead section, last time I looked. Nor could the name "Bill Ayers" even be mentioned in the Barack Obama article, last time I looked. Nor could you get much criticism of Michael Moore in his article, last time I looked. So leftwing propagandists have done pretty well protecting readers from thoughts the leftwing doesn't want them to have. You could probably say the same about a bunch of articles related to the rightwing and controlled by rightwing editors. I just don't have much interest in looking at those articles, so I don't know.

You might want to get in touch with editors like LuLu of the Lotus Eaters, Xenophrenic, Wikidemon and a host of others I don't have the energy to list here. Don't worry, there's an army of them, and they're eager to advance the revolution. For some reason, the leftwingers seem to work together much better than the editors on the right, so you can probably have a lot of fun crushing the demons of capitalism.

Hey, at least someone should have some fun over there.

When the revolution comes, please spare me from incarceration in the re-education camps.