Abd banned from the WMF projects

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Strelnikov
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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Strelnikov » Thu Mar 29, 2018 5:53 am

CrowsNest wrote:I don't think they're winning. Quite the reverse, their methods are very counter-productive, and the harder they try, the wider they reach, the less they will succeed. They actually make intelligent people learn to distrust Wikipedia, to the point they simply do not read it.

I would be sad if the only answer, the only way to serve these skeptic skeptics, was a read only alternative wiki. I think the world can do better, no?


The problem is that people are taking RationalWiki at face value because it shows up near the top when you search for "[paranormal thing] criticism" and RW's article is the number one search result for "Rome Viharo" on Google. Wikipedia is slanted against, but RW is totally opposed to weird crap - there is no neutral online encyclopedia for dealing with these topics, so you have to read websites of this group or person or that and they can range from brainless belief to the "science is a dictatorship; we will never research these topics" mentality of CSICOP, and levels in between. RationalWiki is only there because of SEO tricks and the Google love for Wikipedia and related projects like RW.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Mar 29, 2018 6:20 am

Strelnikov wrote:Just to get the "Rational"Wiki idiots out of everybody's hair, I wish there was a "Fringeapedia" on all fringe topics; a place where you could have NPOV articles on Cold Fusion, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, Fortean stuff, etc. - all the weird theories and encounters and whatnot under one roof with all the articles locked so that knobs like Tim Farley can't screw it up. The skeptics have "Rational"Wiki, the believers/researchers have "Fringapedia" and nobody fights because it's all intellectually segregated*.

That will never happen. Remember, this is the same Internet that makes Milo Yiannnopolis a "cultural hero" and lets The Donald tweet any bizarre self-serving nonsense that crosses his mind. David Gerard fits right in.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Graaf Statler » Thu Mar 29, 2018 9:10 am

@Abd, reading this whole topic I have to say to you as a college SanFanBan winner, you don't have to defend yourself to us. Most wiki admins have Asperger, and believe everything they read. So, if troll has trolled you out they take the word of that troll, not yours. And most of them have obesity, don't know what that is. Every time I look at some pictures, video's of wikipedians I see people with a danger overweight. It shout be a better idea for them if they started some health club instated of this nonsense. Special the woman are far overweighted, I think most of them have a complex because of that, and the wiki mouvement is the only place they are accepted. And they do everything to defend that world, because that insane world is there only world. They simple don't have a life outside in the real world, it's a bunch of losers. And I am not sure myself if you can blame them, but what for sure is you can blame WMF with there crazy behaving with there unfounded SanFanBan's. Because if you claim to be a professional organisation, you have to behave yourself in that way, and for sure they don't!

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Mar 29, 2018 9:32 am

Strelnikov wrote:
CrowsNest wrote:I don't think they're winning. Quite the reverse, their methods are very counter-productive, and the harder they try, the wider they reach, the less they will succeed. They actually make intelligent people learn to distrust Wikipedia, to the point they simply do not read it.

I would be sad if the only answer, the only way to serve these skeptic skeptics, was a read only alternative wiki. I think the world can do better, no?


The problem is that people are taking RationalWiki at face value because it shows up near the top when you search for "[paranormal thing] criticism" and RW's article is the number one search result for "Rome Viharo" on Google. Wikipedia is slanted against, but RW is totally opposed to weird crap - there is no neutral online encyclopedia for dealing with these topics, so you have to read websites of this group or person or that and they can range from brainless belief to the "science is a dictatorship; we will never research these topics" mentality of CSICOP, and levels in between. RationalWiki is only there because of SEO tricks and the Google love for Wikipedia and related projects like RW.
Are you really worried about what people who equate Google ranking with authority believe? Convincing them isn't a victory, nor a threat. There's a school of thought that says there can never be a truly neutral source, that you divine neutrality by reviewing what's available, and basic facts, of course. I can get behind that, it seems to work even in these upside down times. If you're a reasonably intelligent observer with an open mind, of course. As I'd said, I'm a 100% believer in evolution and can't abide a single aspect of ID. But the day you find me recommending anyone read RP or WP is the day I grow a tail. Someone with an open mind can even recognise and explain to others the attraction of ID with respect to the perceived impossibility of evolution. Again, I never learnt any of that from these zealots, I can do it because I recognise science cannot ultimately be rammed down ones throat, it's a personal journey of discovery (hence why the ID proponents bagged the name). The path is available to any reasonably intelligent observer with an open mind, and it's easier to send people down it if you don't use the methods or have the personality faults these people have.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Graaf Statler » Thu Mar 29, 2018 1:59 pm

CrowsNest wrote: There's a school of thought that says there can never be a truly neutral source, that you divine neutrality by reviewing what's available, and basic facts, of course. I can get behind that, it seems to work even in these upside down times.

Correct. And where does that school fits in? Exact, in the way the brain of a autistic person works. They read what they read, and that is the only true!

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Abd » Fri Mar 30, 2018 2:28 am

Strelnikov wrote:Just to get the "Rational"Wiki idiots out of everybody's hair, I wish there was a "Fringeapedia" on all fringe topics; a place where you could have NPOV articles on Cold Fusion, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, Fortean stuff, etc. - all the weird theories and encounters and whatnot under one roof with all the articles locked so that knobs like Tim Farley can't screw it up. The skeptics have "Rational"Wiki, the believers/researchers have "Fringapedia" and nobody fights because it's all intellectually segregated*.

That place was Wikiversity. It has an overall neutrality policy, but expression of opinion was allowed. The way we handled it was that an overall educational resource, in top-level mainspace, would be neutral, and rigorously so, more neutral than even Wikipedia articles -- because it doesn't need to be complete. It can be a bare outline. Then there could be forks, subpages, which could be essays, with named authors. I actually did this with some topics that had been highly controversial on Wikipedia.

I had created a resource that was really a placeholder for a dictionary of terms used by this controversial organization. An editor showed up who was widely known as a debunker, with high conflict on Wikipedia. He started to add incendiary material, from highly biased sources. Instead of revert warring with him, I forked the resource, giving him his own attributed subpage to put whatever he wanted, a second subpage where my original work was moved, and a third subpage for neutral material if someone wanted to work on that. (Like the top-level page, that third subpage would require full neutrality by consensus.) He was flabbergasted. Later, when there were difficulties on another wiki, he trusted my advice and a serious situation was resolved.

This neutrality of Wikiversity, which allowed "filling out" human knowledge well beyond what would be possible or appropriate for Wikipedia, was, to me, a stunning possibility. In theory, Wikiversity was a place where any topic could be discussed, far more similar to a university than to an encyclopedia. There were "fringe physics" articles that were tagged as such. When there were deletion requests for these, they were kept, because one could learn by cleaning them up, by identifying the actual errors, or clarifying what was fringe and what was not. Wikiversity was only partly for classroom resources, it was also for "learning by doing," which became a critical part of the mission.

All that was trashed by the recent intervention on Wikiversity and the decision of the bureaucrat Mu301 (Michael Umbricht) to prohibit fringe science topics on Wikiversity without prior authorization by a review board that did not exist, never had existed, as a total and undiscussed deviation from a decade of tradition. Prior authorization for a wiki page? Who thought that up?

This was the way that Mike pandered to the few users from Wikipedia who had been canvassed by AP socks (i.e., either Oliver D or Darryl L. Smith). He was fairly clear that he was doing it to avoid disruption from Wikipedians, by killing what they would disrupt about. Brilliant, eh? Stop rape by exiling all the women. Stop fringe POV pushing by not allowing any pages on fringe topics. Wikiversity had, before this, completely avoided the issue, and, as a result, the Request for deletion page was inactive for months on end. Revert warring was extremely rare. And people were learning. I certainly did!

Wikipedians had been invited many times to contribute. Sister wiki templates were placed -- and, certainly with cold fusion, promptly removed from the Wikipedia article. (The same thing happened with the parapsychology resource. Participation was invited, and if anyone thought the resource was not neutral, it could have been easily fixed.) No. The Debunking faction wanted to totally kill it. They actually hate Wikipedia neutrality policy, it cramps their style.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Abd » Fri Mar 30, 2018 2:31 am

ericbarbour wrote:
Strelnikov wrote:Just to get the "Rational"Wiki idiots out of everybody's hair, I wish there was a "Fringeapedia" on all fringe topics; a place where you could have NPOV articles on Cold Fusion, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, Fortean stuff, etc. - all the weird theories and encounters and whatnot under one roof with all the articles locked so that knobs like Tim Farley can't screw it up. The skeptics have "Rational"Wiki, the believers/researchers have "Fringapedia" and nobody fights because it's all intellectually segregated*.

That will never happen. Remember, this is the same Internet that makes Milo Yiannnopolis a "cultural hero" and lets The Donald tweet any bizarre self-serving nonsense that crosses his mind. David Gerard fits right in.


The remarkable thing is that it did happen, Wikiversity was that place. However, few recognized it, and when the "SPOV" faction attacked, very few defended it. Wikis go south because people stop paying attention and the obsessives take over.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Abd » Fri Mar 30, 2018 2:43 am

One point to make. The founder of Wikiversity wrote an essay called "Wikipedia Disease." It is actually "wiki disease," the wiki structure, the very concepts, create the conditions where this disease can take over, if structure is not created to balance this. While Wikiversity became a place where intellectual diversity was welcome, it was still a wiki, with standard wiki administration. Administrators burn out, if not replaced or relieved or supported, and some personality types don't recognize the problem and start to take all the spamming and messy editing personally. That started to happen on Wikiversity, it's a long story and I won't tell all of it here. But when I was blocked indef on Wikiversity by a sysop because, in response to one of his acolytes saying that he was expert on dispute resolution, I wrote that he didn't know anything about it, and when nobody would unblock me unless I promised not to make statements like that -- even though his block demonstrated quite clearly that he didn't understand dispute resolution process! -- I did commit to not commenting on him, but only so that I could maintain certain resources, no longer with the hope that Wikiversity could become that safe place, because it wasn't. It had been safer before; at one time that block would have been quickly reversed, similar ones had been.

I gave up developing Wikiversity and I stopped recruiting people for Wikiversity, it was too dangerous. So what happened two years later demonstrated that I was correct. And there are many details I have covered elsewhere.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Mar 30, 2018 3:13 am

It was never really a surprise, the hostility from Wikipedia to Wikiversity. The whole idea there are 'sister' projects is despised by many a Wikipedian. The unofficial leader of this cult within a cult being Fram of course. I call them the originalists. Wikinews, WikiQuote, WikiData, they've all been given short shrift in the past by the same project which thinks nothing of having thousands of outbound links to IMDB et al. Even their approach to linking to Commons is backwards beyond belief.

Have you looked into Everipedia? Last I saw, offering multiple versions of the same article was going to be core to their model, a key differentiator with Wikipedia. Albeit with a system to identify the most trusted version, which is accordingly given highest visibility.

To be honest, rather than completing versions, I much preferred WWHP's approach, AikiWiki - refining the wiki software to eliminate the various human frailties it enables and encourages. Designed right into the system would be rewards for genuine collaboration from a position of mutual respect, and punishment for behavior like ownership and tendentious editing.

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Re: Abd banned from the WMF projects

Post by Mutineer » Sat Mar 31, 2018 4:27 pm

By the page views, this is one of our most popular threads. I dunno why. Maybe it's Abd refreshing it constantly.
I am "Modsquad" here, and participate, but I don't want you to think we can't have an angry argument.

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