Wikipediocracy's enduring obsession with Larry Sanger

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Jake Is A Sellout
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Wikipediocracy's enduring obsession with Larry Sanger

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Mon Apr 19, 2021 10:13 am

What's that all about?

If you find his Tweets on subjects that have little to nothing to do Wikipedia to be a little wierd, here's an idea, just ignore them?

If you think attacking him in you forum as a crazy fool somehow hurts Wikipedia because he was its "co-founder", that only opens you up for mockery and abuse, for three reasons.....

1. For the longest time there, and just because it annoyed your nemesis Jimmy Wales, you absolutely adored the Sanger. Couldn't pass up a single opportunity to hang on the every word of the "co-founder". Quite forgetting that if we could go back in time and kill Baby Sanger, there likely never would have been a Wikipedia.

2. For the longest time, you have hated people like me, serious Wikipedia critics, people who didn't hang on every word of the Sanger and slavishly repeat it as truth, in large part because he did quite often say demonstrably stupid things about Wikipedia, such as this idea Commons was a hive of kiddie porn. You jumped on that bullshit, for the same reasons behind 1.

3. Even though he does now appear to have gone fully into Crazy Town, he is still clearly on some level, the very wise man who once said a bunch of very sensible things about Wikipedia, chiefly the still very valid explanation of how it got to be so massively biased in the field of US political articles.

This is what amazes me. Wikipediocracy's latest assault on the Sanger.....

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewto ... 83#p288778

.....with absolutely no sense of irony, actually calls him out as a stupid head, for in part, having said this.....
Here's... here's another part of an argument perhaps and this... this is moral perhaps legal argument that this wasn't the case back in 2001 but it is now. Wikipedia has a reputation. It's a very important reputation because if something appears on wikipedia a lot of people just assume that it's factual, right? Um... and well what are people supposed to do when uh lies -- really damaging lies -- occur in that sort of situation? Well they could try suing the wikimedia foundation but the wikimedia foundation is going to cite section 230. They can try to sue the... uh... the user, but how are they going to find out who the user is if the user is anonymous?
I mean, fuuuuck.

I don't care how stupid you think the rest of what he said is, if you are advertising yourself as the pre-eminent Wikipedia critics, why the holy fucking hell, would you do ANYTHING to suggest the above were the words of a lunatic?

They are eminently true, and form perhaps a cornerstone of Wikipedia criticism.

With enemies like this, Wikipedia will last a thousand years.

Which sounds about right, because Wikipediocracy is of course, not remotely interested in either killing Wikipedia, or fixing it in way that the end result would actually be a trustworthy reference work.

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Re: Wikipediocracy's enduring obsession with Larry Sanger

Post by NIDA » Mon Apr 26, 2021 2:18 am


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The startling truth about how and why Wikipediocracy jumped right onto the Larry Sanger is kerrazy train

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Tue Jul 20, 2021 12:02 pm

So, if you're paying any attention at all, you'll have realised that Larry Sanger is seen as a crazy fool by both the establishment Wikipedia editors and the good folks of Wikipediocracy.

His not so new critique, recently recirculated by the press again, pointing out how massively biased Wikipedia has become, was raised on Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia talk page, and it was treated as the ravings of a loon. Jimmy didn't even comment. It got the exact same treatment on Wikipediocracy.

So, where did it all go wrong? Because make no mistake. Wikipediocracy never used to be like this. Cast your mind back, to the early days of Wikipediocracy.

As well as taking any and all opportunity to give full and equal credit for creating Wikipedia, and certainly not in a way that made him look crazy compared to the dumb opportunistic fool they cast Wales as, here's a sample of what was going on back then.....

Gregory Kohs was working with Larry to get journalists interested in Wikipedia's faults. Andreas Kolbe was praising Larry as a sage for long ago decrying the undeserved dominance of Wikipedia in Google results. And Peter Damian was agreeing with the Larry Sanger premise that, where it matters, on core articles like Philosophy, rather than pop culture shite, Wikipedia was better in 2002 than it is in 2012.

Perhaps you have already noticed the difference. You don't see Kohs, Kolbe and Damian on that forum anymore. And this is no accident.

Rathe than lay out what we all know to be the truth, I will have my fun and open up the floor to Zolof and Jake, the two people now in charge of the forum. Can they explain why these people no longer seem to think that forum is worth their time?

Perhaps they should, lest it be said by a mischievous scamp, that they were kicked off for agreeing with a crazy person.

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Re: The startling truth about how and why Wikipediocracy jumped right onto the Larry Sanger is kerrazy train

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Aug 30, 2021 1:46 am

missed this the first time.

As you well know by now, petty extremists and backstabbers (left or right) online routinely misuse Godwin's Law to shit on anyone they don't like. Larry is getting that treatment right now--probably in private areas. Both on WP and WPO because WPO is now merely a minor dysfunctional extension of WP.

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