Esperanza: How and why Hope was crushed
Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 5:41 pm
I have an archive of the documentation for Wikipedia: Through the Looking Glass, the book by Barbour, Buckner et al, and it was requested that before I publish those pages, sources be archived, which is a substantial task. As well, the pages are not in wikitext, so importing them to a wiki is also tedious (they have been made available in .odt2 and .pdf). These conditions mean that it may take me as much as a day to prep a file, if there is no collaboration, and there are roughly a thousand files. Volunteers are invited; and it would also be quite useful if the original wikitext were made available, it would cut the work perhaps in half.
This is the page on Esperanza.
There are some missing fragments, deleted for unknown reasons. I've marked them with "[* note]" and there are more. I've seen this in other files, something that was apparently considered important when the file was created is omitted.
Meanwhile, the history of Esperanza, reviewed, clearly demonstrates how and why the Wikipedia structure remained so inefficient and irresponsible. There is much in this, and I'm studying it, and will probably write commentaries.
It's plain as day: whatever might create responsibility in the community was to be crushed, viciously as exemplary punishment. While it would be an error to blame the result on the deletion nominator, her nomination was pure self-interested reactivity to perceived attitudes of a very large community which she considered "non-Wikipedian," and it fed into reactions like hers in the general community.
The way to move beyond that was clear; I proposed it years ago, probably around 2009, before I knew this history except in round outline. Anything that might actually create functional consensus negotiation with wide representation, or that might create responsible executives, was to be "terminated with extreme prejudice," The vehemence of this was obvious by the time I was involved. Given the declared intention to crush anything like it, any genuine consensus-formation activity would need to be off-wiki. There never was enough interest in a general-purpose structure, only scattered efforts by special interests, crushed if found. All naive. (or, more likely, disciplined and effective, and probably paid or supported like that).
Comments are welcome here, of course. PM me for a wikitop.cc account to comment there or help out.
Wikitop.cc is intended for "top-level" consensus negotiation. For those not familiar with Free Association/Delegable Proxy concepts, there can be more than one "top-level meeting," if a top-level meeting is dominated by a faction. There is freedom and power in diversity, combined with voluntary structure. While I don't think it was deliberate, the deletionist critics of Esperanza functionally lied about what was possible.
The book project has been mentioned on Wikipediocracy, and also the Esperanza page.
This is the page on Esperanza.
There are some missing fragments, deleted for unknown reasons. I've marked them with "[* note]" and there are more. I've seen this in other files, something that was apparently considered important when the file was created is omitted.
Meanwhile, the history of Esperanza, reviewed, clearly demonstrates how and why the Wikipedia structure remained so inefficient and irresponsible. There is much in this, and I'm studying it, and will probably write commentaries.
It's plain as day: whatever might create responsibility in the community was to be crushed, viciously as exemplary punishment. While it would be an error to blame the result on the deletion nominator, her nomination was pure self-interested reactivity to perceived attitudes of a very large community which she considered "non-Wikipedian," and it fed into reactions like hers in the general community.
The way to move beyond that was clear; I proposed it years ago, probably around 2009, before I knew this history except in round outline. Anything that might actually create functional consensus negotiation with wide representation, or that might create responsible executives, was to be "terminated with extreme prejudice," The vehemence of this was obvious by the time I was involved. Given the declared intention to crush anything like it, any genuine consensus-formation activity would need to be off-wiki. There never was enough interest in a general-purpose structure, only scattered efforts by special interests, crushed if found. All naive. (or, more likely, disciplined and effective, and probably paid or supported like that).
Comments are welcome here, of course. PM me for a wikitop.cc account to comment there or help out.
Wikitop.cc is intended for "top-level" consensus negotiation. For those not familiar with Free Association/Delegable Proxy concepts, there can be more than one "top-level meeting," if a top-level meeting is dominated by a faction. There is freedom and power in diversity, combined with voluntary structure. While I don't think it was deliberate, the deletionist critics of Esperanza functionally lied about what was possible.
The book project has been mentioned on Wikipediocracy, and also the Esperanza page.
