The Wikipedia Cult (?)
Wikipedia could be the coolest thing in the world or a harbinger of the Dark Ages.
Its founder, Jimbo Wales, is a follower of Ayn Rand which for me is a strong negative. I am very much not impressed by the fact that he's a millionaire and overall his education seems to be rather spotty.
At the same time, his essay on NPOV was very impressive.
He's onto something Big, either the end of civilization as we know it and a new Wiki Dark Age, or the dawn of a genuine new type of knowledge.
What he is on to, he'd be the first to admit (having that strange honesty you sometimes encounter in Randroids in their ongoing reaction to Leninism) is independent of what Jimbo says it is: indeed, to make him definitive of what NPOV is is to form a Mao cult around the thoughts of Jimbo.
Nonetheless, one finds that individual followers of Jimbo in cyberspace do PRECISELY what el Maximo Jimbo says they should not: they make one's personal "success" or personal bio on Wikipedia definitive of one's correct beliefs, and they end up using moral proximity to el Maximo definitive of correctness.
Signs include a systematic confusion of NPOV with neutrality of personal beliefs when in fact it is ONLY the arbiter who feels strongly about issues (for a human being cannot know without feeling) and who in purity of heart sets those views aside to subordinate himself to a principle such as NPOV or a text such as the US Constitution who should be praised as being truly neutral.
I am being precise here. IF you are an ignorant slack-jawed TV brain, with neither knowledge nor views about much of anything outside Paris Hilton, it is news to me that you should be on a jury and big news that you should be considered (as was the massively underqualified Harriet Myers was considered) for a supreme court appointment.
Yet Americans seem to be converging towards this belief, and it is appearing on Wikipedia.
For example, the article on Dilbert was GLOBALLY written from the naive POV that Dilbert is either neutral or a good thing. It accepted the naive reading: that Dilbert as a comic is actually on the side of the employee.
I had a radically different POV: I think Dilbert is classist and closet-racist.
But, of course, I didn't add this claim to the article.
Instead, I noted that left author Norman Solomon has deconstructed Dilbert and shown why he believes that Dilbert manufactures consent to corporate hegemony in a recent book. My contributions became with NPOV a section on Critical Views of Dilbert, because as regards a media phenomenon as opposed to a mathematical theorem, values are facts, in the literal sense that different people interpret Dilbert different ways.
Prior to the emendation, which seems to survive, the article was merely an instance of Gramscian hegemony, for it was, globally and by exclusion, reassurance that Dilbert is kewl, and the massive privatized media empires that own newspapers can be trusted to have a NPOV as regards the legitimacy of corporate hegemony, to the extent that, as seen in Dilbert, there is no alternative.
What I mean is this. Dilbert's "human potential" is restricted to...getting another engineering job at higher pay but in unchanged, alienated, and unquestionable working conditions set by management. The hegemonic POV is the only POV and this cannot, by definition, be a "neutral" POV.
Whereas it was my personal experience that one can escape the cube WITHOUT becoming a gazillionaire, publish a non-best selling book yet take pride in touching a few minds and souls, work for a while as a telemarketer in a humane women and minority owned firm with no assholes around, and wind up on an island where I can go to a locally owned store without a shirt and barefoot if I want.
Wikipedia has the potential for real tragedy because while ideas (such as NPOV) are independent of our desires (Ayn Rand's true, but jejune, insight) without PEOPLE as the instantiation of ideas, ideas would not exist in a world that Jon Schell described some time ago as "the republic of insects and grass".
Reification is the ignorance of the need for people to have ideas for ideas to exist, and, of course, Ayn Rand never met a reification she didn't like; sexually speaking, it appears she was a nympho as regards phallocentric reification, from which the habit of high-class reification may stem.
Reification taken to the extremes I have seen in my twenty years of blasting the net, and getting blasted in turn, creates a world correctly described by Minnesota poet Robert Bly as one without GRAMMAR, in which parsing is, to the ordinary slob, whose fears and ignorance increasingly define knowledge today, something probably bad and something that Clinton did.
[NetSlaves 2.0, a book about abuse of real techs, describes the horror of a management when it was discovered that an employee had written a parser. The managers didn't know what a parser was but they knew it was bad, while at the same time valuable, like the Maltese Falcon.]
As such, while Jimbo seems to realize that NPOV is independent of beliefs, I have already discovered that (1) I have a "bad attitude" on Wikipedia because I have an "agenda" and that (2) being a dull fellow who posts random facts without an organizing idea or a sense of history (cf. the article on Figure Drawing) is to many actual wiki denizens a Good Attitude.
In fine, Ayn Rand and Jimbo Wales are on to something in spite of themselves, something that expresses for better or worse the World Spirit, who, Adorno knew, might not be our friend.
A tale from North Carolina
I became friends with a video store clerk in Durham. She'd gotten a masters in poli sci at UNC Chapel Hill but couldn't get a job in the good old boy system of NC. Her aging parents needed someone to look after them so she had to stay in North Carolina.
She didn't want to go out with me because, she said, she'd succumbed to the charms of too many rogues and was in recovery therefrom. I accepted this explanation but I thought it worth while to ask.
Well...one day I went to rent a video, and her coworker told me she'd died. She'd taken an overdose of the prescribed anti--depressants she used. The police ruled out suicide and the coroner said it was a "natural" overdose.
And that is all she wrote. What a waste, I thought. Sure, she made "choices". Like Sartre's student, she could have abandoned her parents and gone up to Washington, but just as I elected to NOT go to the first conference at which Bill Gates and Paul Allen introduced Altair Basic, because my wife complained that she was pregnant and needed me, she may be said to have chosen her path in life.
Juries
...originally were supposed to be people familiar with the crime, today have to be people ignorant of the crime, and, it seems, everything else.
I was selected for a jury once. I became the foreman and got to read the verdict. Unfortunately, the case was nonsense. A fat lady in New Jersey, using a health club on a free pass, slipped and "fell".
I, and a lady on the jury, were unable to persuade the remaining members that the situation had all the markings of an organized racket, with a lawyer and a doctor in the same building who MAY have been recruiting fat women and giving them free passes, saying, go and fall down, honey, we'll do the rest: ya don't have to hurt yerself, we'll find something broken or "pain".
The rest of the jury said, give 'em some money and lesgo home.
Impossible Objectivity?
Hi Edward,
I've read your post a couple of times now with interest. Besides the fact that I have found Wikipedia to be an excellent resource, I also am interested in Wikipedia as a phenomenon. It is of course associated with the "Web 2.0" thing (I highly recommend the Tim O'Reilly article I linked to there) and has been praised, among other things, for its "harnessing of collective intelligence." It's exciting to be experiencing these things as they happen, because surely people will be studying this time in history books someday.
An interesting related phenomenon has been demonstrated in a couple of your posts, Edward, and also in other blog posts I've encountered around the web--I'm referring to the consternation over Wikipedia's imperfections and the bucking against the air of authority that it has garnered. I don't share this consternation, but I don't mean to criticize it. I'm certain that criticism from all quarters is healthy for such a grand and public experiment as Wikipedia.
I wonder how much of that consternation is caused by the "pedia" suffix, and with it the implied assertion that "This is an Encyclopedia, and Encylopedia's are authoritative (remember all those school reports you wrote from them?), so Wikipedia is authoritative." I'm not saying necessarily that the proprietors of Wikipedia have overplayed this perception--only that the connotations of the "pedia" suffix imply a level of authority to people who may not be taking into account the natural limitations of the collaborative Wikipedia free-for-all approach. Full objectivity is impossible; subjectivity is inevitable.
The limitations of this inherently subjective enterprise, though, might be exactly what gives Wikipedia its considerable strengths--the huge breadth of subject matter, the timeliness of information, the infinite interlinking, the power of anyone anywhere to add their two cents. Perhaps the urge to drive out the imperfections of Wikipedia will strangle it.
Edward, I can't comment on your speculations about the "cultishness" you write about because I have not observed the Wikipedia community close enough, nor have I given the articles I occassionally visit that level of critical reading. In brief, though, I would say that I am not bothered by subjectivity and imperfections that stem from the fact that Wikipedia articles are not subjected to the kind of academic scrutiny a Britannica article might receive. But that's a comment from a reader's point of view, not a contributor's.
As with any sort of "doctrine" within a community or organization, if indeed "Neutral Point Of View" is being used as a stick instead of as a guide, that could be problematic in the long term. Zealotry and True Believers have ruined many well intentioned enterprises, whether or not the founder(s) of that enterprise are encouraging said zealotry.
Best,
Dan
Wiki Wiki Wiki Again
After returning from a trip to Costa Rica this week, I hit Wikipedia to see what kind of information was out there about some of the animals I encountered. One animal I didn't encounter but wished I could see is called a kinkajou. Of course, in reading the short Wikipedia article I learned that this lovable little animal has been popularized as a pet by the beloved Paris Hilton!
I've noticed in quite a few articles that feeble little people seem to like to tack on little celibrity-association tidbits to articles. Why they are so intent on doing this, I have no idea. I actually cleaned up the wording of the kinkajou a little bit and was tempted to snip the PH reference, but restrained myself lest I upset some eager teenager. I left the appalling grammar of the PH sentence stand, though, lest I lend tacit approval.
A wild animal I actually did see was the scarlet macaw. Wow! What an amazing treat to see a flock of those huge birds feeding in a tree in the wild, not at all caring about two American tourists staring through binoculars not 30 feet away! This subject lead me to the Wikipedia entry on aviculture or the breeding and raising of caged birds. To paraphrase an illustrious friend (forgive me), "They keep birds in cages? That's terrible!"
Yes, they do. But the Wikipedia article gives no hint that there might be any controversy about this fact, or of the horrible environmental toll taken by those who capture wild birds for the pet trade. With apologies to another friend who recently acquired caged birds of his own, it astounds me that anyone would want to keep a bird in a tiny little cage for their own amusement. Even domestically bred birds are not domestic animals like chickens or cats. They are wild animals and they were meant to fly and migrate and hunt for food and build nests. Yes, this is one man's opinion, but you'd think that the Wikipedia article might be able to at least acknowledge that aviculture is not, in the view of many, a completely benign activity.
I restrained myself from adding a carefully worded paragraph on the controversy because, well, I didn't want to start a controversy or be accused as some have been of not having a good attitude.
Wikipedia is a wiki and you can post or change what you want. But rest assured, if you tread into an important topic (bird for example) your alterations will immediately be noted by the gatekeepers and will be "fixed" if they do not accord with certain standards. That's not necessarily a problem, but it somewhat undercuts the concept of collective intelligence. You've got to have some kind of gatekeeper or control or you end up with collective stupidity (read: juries). And if you have gatekeepers, then you've got a single person or small group controlling content and that's not really so different from other sources of content after all.
Objectivity and encyclopedias
Commercial encyclopedias are sometimes as flawed as "government" encyclopedias such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, *Bolshi Sovietskaya Encyclopendia Narodskninaya Zap* (caution: the Russian is parodic and NOT the Russian name).
The "classic" 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica, according to Amaryta Sen, the India philosopher and economist, got its India dynasties all bollixed up, and a professor of mine told me some years ago that his article for the Microsoft encyclopedia was almost destroyed by editing.
The Wikipedia theory is that the truth of the encyclopedia will converge on unity and at this time it appears to be very approximately 92%, since as Internet participation grows on the part of the proletariat, there are more honest and sane people.
The early Internet didn't only attract geniuses. It also attracted a disproportionate share of lunatics and pathological liars, as do financial ventures. But as more and more statistically ordinary people with real jobs access the Internet and Wikipedia, a bias towards honesty will in theory emerge, since they cannot profit by being dishonest.
Jimbo Wales is not only a follower of Ayn Rand, a superficial woman driven mad by the true miseries of Communism and the false promises of the free market. He also learned something I'll call "financial epistemology", which needs to be taken seriously.
It is the way that financial markets can produce, not only "the madness of crowds" but also their wisdom.
Sorting out instances of madness from instances of wisdom is however very difficult. Randroids for example seem ignorant of Keynes, who tried to demonstrate that too often, the crowd doesn't try to judge the truth, but to judge what other people will believe.
Keynes gave the example of a bathing beauty contest in which the judges try to determine what girl will get the most votes. This is why Blondes have more Fun in Europe and America, for my observations indicate that statistically, Brunettes, Ravens and Redheads are cuter.
But even Keynes didn't go deep enough. Staying with the topic of pretty girls for a while, I would say that when I was young, we were forbidden by the priests and nuns from looking at women in their knickers.
Our objection was that it was a "natural" urge. In fact, during a discussion of the issue in Religion class, a kid said, approximately, "well, gee, Faddah, if abortion is wrong because it's únnatural, why idn't it okay for me to read Playboy because I have what you yourself admit is a natural urge?"
Faddah O'Donoghue was unable to answer the question to the class's collective satisfaction with the result that a whole class of Christian Gentlemen had to be reproved, rebuked, admonished and advised many years later by their Catholic, feminist and formidable wives...and were probably reduced to checking out the bods in women's magazines discarded by those ladies, a common refuge of the American married male whose wife prohibits the importation of Maxim.
Faddah O'Donoghue should have gotten a load of Foucault in addition to his Maritain, for a Foucaldian reading of Maxim would reassure him of the sinfulness of Maxim.
For while appearing natural, the ladies in laddie magazines are clearly the playthings of Capital (Kapital) and the superrich, and Maxim, like Playboy in my salad days, teaches not "nature" but worship of money, power and the control of women, and in so doing, misleads young men into careers of quiet desparation on all nights except Saturday (when the desparation is noisy) because they have been taught that money is the price of admission to nature.
Their sexuality is sold back to them.
To get back to Wikipedia, any judgement with an evaluative component (most judgements, that is) would on Keynes' account be unnatural because the judger, the evaluator, would be trying to guess what OTHER PEOPLE thought.
This would result in closed systems akin to serious fandom (such as the cults that surround Hello Kitty, Manga, or Dungeons and Dragons).
Universalizing Keynes' hypothesis would mean that there is no "reality".
But, of course, Keynes believed very much in reality. He thought that it had to include government intervention to jump start an economy because for Keynes, "reality" included the possibility that a pure laissez-faire economy might generate business cycles longer than a human life (he identified one such business cycle to be the European Dark Ages).
We can't know "reality"through Ayn Rand's objectivism. Instead you know reality by continually probing its boundaries.
La Rand wanted to end epistemology, but as soon as you do, the closed system generates serious bullshit.
For example, when I encountered the Wikipedia article on Dilbert, I discovered that its "reality" was summarized in the axiomatic statement "Dilbert is axiomatically cool because many other people like it and its creator got rich".
Therefore what constituted a "fact" in the original Dilbert article was in fact, only a "fact" which did not contradict the axiom.
In particular, the FACT that Norman Solomon wrote and published a book purporting to show that Dilbert was CEO propaganda, that set engineers against middle managers to disempower both, was considered a somewhat "shrill" opinion when I conducted a raid on the site.
However, my Berserking the site, like the depredations of the Danes in England in the Dark Ages, had a peaceful outcome, since other posters edited and discussed my contributions, and now, the article contains a Danelaw in the form of a section, a FACTUAL section, on critical views of Dilbert.
But, I digress (ÿeah, you digress - Dan Appleman March 2004).
In the absence of a financial reason to vandalize Wikipedia, the experience of posting True and On the Level facts to Wikipedia, and balancing POV bias, is one that escapes market relations, and for this reason is determined by the Fun factor...and LEGITIMATELY energized by the Berserker spirit when you are angered by bias, and can only redress it by the reverse bias. I would guess that knowing and posting the truth, and creating Fairness and Balance is statistically and for most people more Fun than posting bullshit.
It is only partly true that one man's bullshit is another man's truth. In the last analysis, some bullshit is just true.
So, whaddya you guys think of Proof?
John Siegenthaler and Wikipedia
USATODAY.com recently published an editorial from John Seigenthaler in which he recounts his own experience with Wikipedia - discovering that his biography on the site featured what he claims were (I don't know his bio well enough to know whether his claims are true or false) a lot of falsehoods/slander, that other sites automatically suck down and repackage the contents of Wikipedia (*shock and horror*) fact-checking every atom of information, that there was no way to catch the evildoers except for John/Jane Doe lawsuits (the RIAA anti-filesharer tactic), etc.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edi...
Not directly related to your original post, but I thought that you might be interested.
Siegenthaler's rants
The solution to this problem already is built into the wiki system.
To me, it is odd that the offended journalist John Siegenthaler did not go into Wiki mode and immediately upload corrections to these "offensive slanders." His son, who originally informed him about the erroneous wiki-biography, should have done the same--before he drew the attention of his thin-skinned old man to the virtual "character assassination"....next, he simply could have emailed the webmasters who linked to the bad info with the update. And in the wiki discussion section, they could have spelled out their objections and sourced the true info. Problem solved in five minutes
Obviously this geriatric journo wanted to avenge his honor, trace the flamer, and go to court. All that is unnecessary the wiki way.
More Wikipedia Thoughts
I appreciate, Sunsloth, the point you make that the wiki system has built-in ways to deal with this sort of situation. However, having just now re-read Seigenthaler 's USA Today editorial, it does not sound to me like he was ranting, nor did I detect a desire to go to court if he doesn't have to. Not everyone knows or understands the "wiki way," but it seems to me that Seigenthaler followed a reasonable course. And it seems reasonable that he would want to "unmask," as he says, the person who slandered him.
In fact, most of Seigenthaler's ire is directed at his would-be biographer and at the bureauocracy, for lack of a better term, that he's trying to fight in his quest to find out who he or she is. This is understandable, and to me reasonable. Were I in his position, I might feel the same way.
I also found this blog post, in which blogger Rafe Colburn states:
"To me, in the Siegenthaler case, Wikipedia flat out failed. An anonymous user posted defamatory information about a public figure and nobody caught it for months. Had Siegenthaler himself not found the article, who knows when it would have been corrected, if ever? ... I'm not sure how to solve the problem that burned Siegenthaler. Wikipedia is going to prevent anonymous users from posting new articles as of this week, but that doesn't change the fact that obscure articles are hard to fact check. Generally speaking, Wikipedia editors should probably remove accusations like the one in the Siegenthaler article unless they are accompanied by credible references."
Colburn points out where I depart from Siegenthaler: Colburn acknowedges the failure, and the need to improve, but has an underlying assumption that Wikipedia is viable. Siegenthaler, on the other hand, has (understandably) taken a negative view of Wikipedia overall. This is unfortunate.
In one place he writes, "I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool." Flawed? Certainly, as are most things. Irresponsible? That seems like a stretch to me. I try to remember that this is a big experiment. No one has ever done anything like this before. As it grows and evolves, Wikipedia will hit challenges like this, and hopefully, like the democratic ideals on which it is based, it will use them as opportunities to get better. It sounds in this case like they have.
Siegenthaler closes his piece with this:
When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of "gossip." She held a feather pillow and said, "If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people."
For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.
I would like to say to Mr. Siegenthaler that Wikipedia is not special in this regard. It's a phenomenon of the internet itself--people perceive a consequence-free environment and consequently feel free to indulge the inner jackass. It's the same reason a guy will lean out his car window and yell something crude and sexual to a female jogger but would never think of doing anything like that at work, at the grocery store, or at church. He feels free to do it while he's driving in his car because he feels anonymous, disconnected from the fellow human he is about to assault verbally; he feels emboldended by his anonymity because it implies a lack of consequences. Wikipedia enables this phenomenon in a different way, but is not unique in that respect. Siegenthaler's metaphorical feather pillow is the Internet, not Wikipedia.
Dan
Sunsloth...
Your comments are ageist. A man has a right to a good name at the end of his life.
Your comments are uncalled for.
How curious that in cults, subordinate members and outsiders can be disrespected without limit while the leader is always spared critique.
During the Cultural Revolution in China, aged and respected university professors were fair game even when they not only gave lip service to Chinese marxism but in their personal conduct manifested actual proletarian virtues such as humility and solidarity: cf. Wild Swans, by Jung Chan.
But Mao was never fair game until Deng had the balls to criticise him...after Mao and his wife were dead.
Young punks tear into each other on The Apprentice, but in the boardroom it's always Mister Trump: they perform kow-tow yi er san to a man who is according to REAL real estate professionals a complete failure at a bone-headedly simple game, like God.
Sure, you can fight back. I am an unusual old fart at 56 because I have more than thirty years of experience with technology, and when wikipedia was vandalized to make an entry for Nilgewater (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nilgewater), I posted the facts.
But most men and women my age and older have better things to do.
You punks haven't overthrown Donald Rumsfeld. If an old man lies ALL THE TIME, if an old man uses fear and intimidation ALL THE TIME, he's treated as some sort of sacred monster.
Whereas a good man like Clinton is hounded continuously.
It is all too well known that Yeats said that the good lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.
It is less well known that he also said that with hearts grown brutal we have filled ourselves with fantasies.
It is in fine a libertarian mistake to "stand up" for the wrong in the name of liberty when good people are being hounded.
I retain enough faith in humanity to say that posts like the Siegenthaler libel will converge out, and the system will converge on truth. But this requires solidarity. Siegenthaler has a RIGHT to his good name.
The Punk Meets the Godfather
Sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge to use the title of one of my favorite Who songs (from Quadrophenia) for this comment. Don't read to much into it, though...just being playful.
Edward, I appreciate and agree with your defense of Mr. Siegenthaler's right to protect his good name. However, it seems that "young punks" is as ageist a phrase as Sunsloth's "geriatric journo" (an unfortunate turn of phrase that sounds like something from a celebrity gossip rag--sorry, Sunsloth).
I also feel compelled to defend Sunsloth against this:
"How curious that in cults, subordinate members and outsiders can be disrespected without limit while the leader is always spared critique."
I'm not really on board with your concept of Wikipedia as a cult-like community (though as I wrote in a previous comment, I've not studied long on this question), but regardless I see no reason to assume that Sunsloth is a member of this hypothetical cult, and even if he was, I did not see that he was defending "the leader." Sunsloth's comments relate more to the idea that the wiki system, the "wiki way," has within itself the capacity to rectify this type of situation. As Rafe Colburn asserts, perhaps the wiki system failed in this case, but that's a point of argument between Sunsloth and Colburn that has nothing to do with "Jimbo." It's also perhaps useful to point out that wikis did not originate in Wikipedia, and were not invented by Wales. The wiki was invented by Ward Cunningham, and first appeared in the original (and excellent) WikiWikiWeb--my point being that I don't view Sunsloth's defense as necessarily one of Wikipedia, but rather of the wiki concept.
Anyway, I wanted to throw a little cold water on a debate that in my opinion need not be so heated. It seems to me we can discuss Wikipedia without calling people cultists or "geriatric journos" or comparing them to Mao. I prefer to start from an assumption, until proven otherwise, that there is good intention behind every sentiment or action, even if the manifestation of said sentiment or action appears abrasive. Sometimes it's clear that someone is just being an asshole, but that's the exception in my experience; and even then, I can have pity on an asshole.
Respectfully yours,
Dan
SUNSLOTH...
Siegenthaler's kid was unable to prevent the fact that other sites sourced the slander. The fix for this wrong is NOT built into Wikipedia.
Perhaps Jimbo should consider a waiting period before the information can be copied or linked-to. The model would be the ten-second delay you see in "live" TV at times, so that if someone says damn or hell it can be bleeped.
Have to think this through, of course. And it goes directly against a modern, pornographic, desire to see people who unlike Donald Rumsfeld get hurt bad in public. Precisely because the news is so carefully controlled to elide pure suffering by real people, except insofar as it lets the elite strike poses at Live Aid, the pornographic hunger is to see the weakling, the "thin skinned old man" cry.
As if this will change anything.
Breaking news concerning Wikipedia and Siegenthaler from the BBC
According to the BBC story, unregistered users won't be able to post new articles as a result of Siegenthaler's complaint.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4502846.stm
I conclude that people should never feel they are being thin-skinned and should speak up.
Unfortunately, an anonymous user can still edit and vandalize. I feel that only registered and traceable users should be able to edit articles.
[[editor's note: verbatim article removed to avoid copyright infringement concerns--please follow the link above to read the article--thanks]]
Wikipedia: one more news item
I mentioned that I was flamed by wiki vandalism. In 2004, some comp.programming posters added "Nilgewater" to wiktionary as a word. I edited the entry to make it clear that only a few posters knew the word and called it "a fucking libel", being an elegant fellow.
As of today, a regular Wiktionary administrator, SemperBlotto, has removed the entry for Nilgewater, based either on my complaint posted as a correction to the article or on the rarity of the word.
One does NOT have to do what one is told in the office or on the Web by "libertarians": take abuse in the name of "free speech".
Not that I care as much as Siegenthaler, for while he is 78 and deserves a dignified rustication, I am a young 56 and I enjoy negative publicity, since it usually represents an opportunity for me to carpet bomb the site.
Free speech
There is "free speech" and there is speech that alienates others by crucifying their sacred cows. I suppose I am guilty of wanting to employ what was described as a Clinton perogative: compartmentalization. Some how, at this site, I become uncomfortable when we stray too far afield from our common interest: software development. I like to think that however vastly different our backgrounds, cultures, and even IQs, we share that. Of course I realize the psyche is complicated and everything (politics, religion, family, work) is interwoven. Yet, I hope folks here realize that when some off-the-cuff remarks are made (and we're all guilty of it at some time or another) it can trigger the fight or flight syndrome. Maybe that's the point? To awaken the groggy masses from their silent complacency?
Sorry...
...I read a common element between the false democratization of the Cultural Revolution and the way Siegenthaler was expected to be silent because, it was claimed, that Wikipedia is self-healing.
I got a little perfervid and heated and I apologize, Sunsloth, for calling you a "punk"...although it was in the general context of "you punks", and "you punks" was meant to be so over the top as to be recognizable as rhetoric, something to liven things up with...nothing personal.
I was writing somewhat to show what an old fashioned man should do in a free society which is mouth off when he is tread upon or one of his fellow beings is tread upon.
Punk'd
Edward, from now on, when you want to play the grumpy old man, the term you should apply to miscreant youth is "you whippersnappers". ;-)
One man's quest
Your comments about Wikipedia remind me of a book my #2 daughter is reading: The Know it All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs. (Perhaps someone can borrow from this concept when titling their sequel to Write Your Own since there are only two superior programmers...) Apparently it's a romp through the Encyclopedia Britannica, and according to Amazon reviewers it is either funny and riveting, or exceedingly annoying. I grew up on the EB, so I expect to take a gander and form my own opinion.
Wikipedia...well you have to appreciate the massive undertaking...like Project Gutenburg, which I have enjoyed quite a bit. (I'm one of the few customers of the Rocketbook.)
You also touched on juries, and of course that caught my attention as I spent the past month of so slogging through state provided data to randomly select a pool of eligible jury candidates...a dreaded biennial process. I say dreaded because one can be subpoenaed to explain to a judge and jury the logic that was followed. (By the way, I am on the list.) Of course there were also people aged 105 or so who could not be eliminated due to age, although I fathom most would appreciate that sort of age discrimination. I expect that most records in that category were deceased persons and indicative of the poor quality of the data in question. After all, my father received a summons last year, 5 years after his death...an upsetting thing for a relative. I'd love to know where you'd draw the line if IQ was provided. That reminds me that my daughter was just asking me if I'd been to a high school class reunion. I said, yes, but it was strange because my best friend, a mathematical genius with an IQ of 180 or so, ended up in a half-way house (drug/alcohol) in her first year of college. So the last time I heard, she cuts hair. I managed to earn a master's degree despite my far inferior intellect. Go figure. Perhaps too much intelligence is a little hard to live with...maybe you are tormented by all that you know. I expect my natural dullness has helped me survive many a mind-searingly boring lecture and meeting.