Chelsea Manning

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CrowsNest
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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Jun 02, 2018 10:19 pm

No, for the most part the policies are clear. People usually have to work quite hard to find an inconsistency, and it's usually quite a minor or esoteric issue they find. There really isn't any ambiguity to the things I've said above about what does and does not apply, and how it should be intepreted. I could be wrong, but I'm probably not.

We all speak English, we all have a common understanding of what words like public and trivial mean. We all surely just know as a matter of course that a suicide attempt, even if just a cry for help, during a Senate run, is a big deal with huge ramifications. As such, interpreting the relevant policies here is no big hassle.

Consensus theoretically steps in for issues of narrow subjectivity of terms or miscommunications, but only if people go into it with an open mind and a good attitude. Neither is really a feature of talk page debates on Wikipedia, as seen here.

The issue really is why Wikipediots choose to have wildly different interpretations of policy, well beyond what ordinary variance would suggest or that consensus building could possibly cope with, to the point they will say the most ridiculous things, as seen here, to shoehorn an inapplicable policy into a situation or misinterpret an applicable one, just because they want to win.

The only source of confusion or incoherence in this issue, is because people are quite willing to see nonconformance happening, if it means they win. If not stupidity, it is a conscious choice. This is what being a Wikipedian is all about, the quality of being able to be quite happy for the rest of the world to see you as crazy (because an outsider's sole reason for reading the policy is to understand wtf is going on), as long as you win.

A key issue is consequences. In this situation, the guy who claimed PERSISTENCE is relevant, faced no consequences for that obviously false statement. Whether he said it because he is stupid or because he is trying to win, doesn't really matter. Indeed, so far, he is on the winning team. As are those calling this tabloid reporting of the daily Twitterverse.

Zero consequences, for utter stupidity or worse. That could basically be the Wikipedia community's motto. The only winning move here, is not to play. Just point and laugh.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by sashi » Sun Jun 03, 2018 12:00 am

I would agree that the page should include info about the failed appeal, that is an eminently reasonable edit-request. I also don't get the impression that the Senate-run has ever really been all that serious. But I guess I can't check poll numbers now that the Sun has been blacked out in Europe.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:00 am

Manning can affect the outcome even if they themselves do not have a chance in hell of winning.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by Flip Flopped » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:21 am

sashi wrote:I'm not sure I agree with you on this Crowsnest. I do not know what B. Manning was like before spending years in solitary, but I have watched C. Manning interviewed on Democracy Now! after. My impression was of a troubled individual who would have their work cut out for them readjusting to life outside prison. This is probably the case for every person who gets released after long periods of solitary confinement (though some may have been psychologically stronger than Manning to begin with). The "call for help" of someone suffering from PTSD only seems "notable" to me because Manning is in the press' eye 24-7.
Apparently the people who served in the military with Manning found her to have been a complete asshole who couldn't get along with the group and was selfish and full of self-pity.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by AndrewForson » Sun Jun 03, 2018 10:42 am

CrowsNest wrote:No, for the most part the policies are clear. People usually have to work quite hard to find an inconsistency, and it's usually quite a minor or esoteric issue they find.

It didn't take me very long to find Wikipedia:Ignore all rules:
WP:IAR wrote:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.

So rules are rules,except when they aren't.

If you want a more concrete example, try Wikipedia:Notability:
WP:GNG wrote:Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article.

This makes perfect sense and indeed is more or less inevitable when all the articles have to be plagiarised from other sources by people who know and care little about the subjects. But we know that articles are handed out, or withheld, as rewards for being the sort of people and things that Wikipedians approve of. So, for example, WP:PORNBIO for people who appear on film performing sex acts, allows for any old stuff about people whose real names aren't even known, because that's what Wikipedians like: on the other hand Sarah Stierch was deleted because she had previously been a cult member in good standing, but suddenly became an unperson. Nothing to do with the rules as expressed, everything to do with internal politics.

Again, Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia that Anyone can edit except that Wikipedia:Competence is required, which means that anyone who agrees with the prevailing cultural norms can edit. One of those prevailing norms is Wikipedia:Civility:
WP:CIV wrote:editors should always treat each other with consideration and respect
Except when your name is Eric.

And so on and so on ...

I think that what CN means is that there is a set of policies which are more or less coherent and more or less what one might expect for a group of people writing an encyclopaedia. Unfortunately, there are other policies, practices and precedents that are inconsistent with the first lot, and which group prevails at any given moment is best understood purely in terms of a MMORPG.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jun 03, 2018 12:04 pm

What I mean is that none of those actual policies are remotely unclear or inconsistent, the problem is how often Wikipedians are prepared to ignore them if they feel they need to, and there are literally no consequences. WP:CIV is a perfect example of why they do it. The existence of PORNBIO is what I call an esoteric issue, and it is worth noting that the inherent inconsistency there is so obvious, the Wikipedians themselves are actively trying to fix it, just as they are doing with schools. Arguably it would have already been fixed it they correctly applied their other rules about what to do with tendentious editors. They don't.....because inconvenient.

The existence of IAR is a red herring (and doesn't justify this or any other example of them ignoring their rules when Wikipedia is demonstrably not improved by doing so), I've written extensively on how that is a widely misunderstood concept, even by critics for purposes just like this, it doesn't need repeating here. Suffice to say, there is no inconsistency, given it is a rule, and given what it says, all other rules are subservient to it.

What "anyone can edit" means is an interesting issue, one we critics can easily use to frequently laugh at Wikipedia because it is so transparently not true. But my integrity leads me to point out that no, just because "anyone can edit" exists as a marketing slogan, doesn't mean it shows their rules are unclear or inconsistent. It is worth noting that, of the five holy pillars, "Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute" is the only one that doesn't directly map to an equivalent rule. They of course map what "free", "use" and "distribute" mean to applicable rules, but interestingly, they only offer up WP:OWN as being remotely relevant to the idea anyone can edit. There is no rule given there to define what anyone can edit means, but they do have a ton of rules explaining who can't edit. So no real inconsistency in the rules, just questionable practices regarding now they market their product. Thankfully for them, they have no rule which says thou shalt not deceptively market Wikipedia.

There is an apparent inconsistency at the highest level which draws on those two concepts - is it a valid application of IAR to allow edits made by banned editors to stand if they manifestly improve Wikipedia (in isolation)? It depends on whether you think giving banned editors a motivation to continue to try edit, improves Wikipedia. The solution they came up with was that if you see a banned editor make a good edit, the right way to apply the rules is to revert their edit but then make it yourself, thereby taking ownership of it and reinforcing the idea that banned means banned, and all your edits will be reverted.

So even there, they managed to come up with a solution which is consistent with all rules, especially IAR. An eminently mockable kludge, sure, but not inconsistent. Or unclear. Except for the fact that understandably, this remains an example of settled wiki case law that they'd rather not have publicised because it will mean they have to waste their time following it.

So it would be a real shame if people loudly advertised the fact that IF YOU ARE A BANNNED EDITOR YOU CAN STILL EDIT WIKIPEDIA AS YOUR TRUE SELF, AND IF THE EDIT IS GOOD THEY ARE MEANT TO REVERT IT BUT IMMEDIATELY REAPPLY IT UNDER THEIR OWN NAME, OTHERWISE YOU CAN REPORT THEM TO ADMINISTRATORS FOR BREAKING THE RULES. A real shame.

So, anyway, to bring this back to the topic - the Chelsea Manning article is currently not accurate, neutral or in any way meeting the definition of an encyclopedia, not because their rules are inconsistent or unclear, but because they are ignoring them, either wilfully with dubious motives, or just out of sheer stupidity.

By default, because nobody else cares and the debate has stalled with nobody being called out for being an idiot, the official position is how one of these morons just summarised it.......
There has been no further coverage of these events in the past 4 days or so and I've been unable to find any new sources that add anything. All we have is a single wave of news reports saying that Manning's tweets/window ledge photo caused concern for her well being, that her account tweeted a short while later that she is "safe" and that her campaign is not suspended. We also have an interview with Glenn Greenwald where he speculates about her. This seems textbook WP:NOTNEWS to me.
I challenge anyone to find any part of WP:NOTNEWS that would support this view. You will not, because it is complete and total garbage.

The article protection has now lapsed, but Wikipedia being what it is, namely broken, you will not be allowed to make the necessary update to improve this article and ensure the world, specifically voters in Maryland, are given top quality information, even though it can be sourced to impeccable publications whose accuracy can be trusted. Because on Wikipedia, there are no consequences for talking garbage.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by AndrewForson » Sun Jun 03, 2018 3:42 pm

We seem to have very different ideas about what it means for rules to be inconsistent. CN seems to think that this would only be the case in one rule simultaneously requires two different and incompatible things in the same situation, and that no individual rule is inconsistent in that way. I maintain that the rules are inconsistent in that one rule may require one thing and another rule require a different thing in the same situation -- and gave several examples.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jun 03, 2018 6:48 pm

You only found one real example, and it applies to a small group of articles, and is actively being fixed.

It's an easy task for the Wikipedians to respond to the others as I did, they know the rules even if they don't follow them, so I'm doing you a favour by showing you how weak these points are.

The Manning article is incomplete, and there is no point in anyone trying to blame the rules for that, not least because it lets these people off the hook for being utter morons, or actively working to suppress information for nefarious purposes.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by AndrewForson » Sun Jun 03, 2018 7:40 pm

You seem to be arguing from a position that allows for the possibility that Wikipedia might be, in some sense, fixed. I disagree. It can't be fixed, and the incoherence in its rag-bag of policies is neither fixable nor intended to be fixed. It's an intrinsic part of the cult, and a means by which, as you correctly point out, the apparent authority of Wikipedia can be exploited by savvy contributors or groups to promote their own interests.

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Re: Chelsea Manning

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jun 03, 2018 10:13 pm

AndrewForson wrote:You seem to be arguing from a position that allows for the possibility that Wikipedia might be, in some sense, fixed.
Since that would be a first for me, it seems unlikely. I've repeatedly posted about how it cannot be fixed, that it only works in theory, not in practice. Part of that is obviously to point out that the rules are sensible and consistent, and the reason they're not being applied is because rules on their own do not an encyclopedia make. Obviously if I'm arguing that the rules make sense, then somehow it surely could be made to work. But the things that need changing are the things which makes Wikipedia, Wikipedia. To fix in that sense, is to destroy. Several sacred cows need to be slaughtered - who can edit, why they edit, how they edit, and who oversees their edits, to name a few.

That's not to say the rules are perfect. For a start there is the use of a raft of Wikipedia specific terms, and their annoying use of real world terms to mean something else in Wikipedia. And they have ballooned into a giant bureaucracy so some inconsistency is inevitable, and noncompliance will often be down to people simply being unaware what the relevant rule says. That is largely not the case for Manning, where the rules are the ones most editors should be aware of, and there's no complicated or confusing terminology.

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