On 1/10/07, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
Someone on this mailing recently started a thread:
Subject: [WikiEN-l] psychosis and wikipedia.
I'd love to see some psychology-oriented individual do a case study on what kind of people are attracted to editing on Wikipedia. What psychological defects lurk behind the computer screens and the keyboards.
Could we please, please, _please_ try to tone down some of the use of wildly exaggerated language and hype in this mailing list?
Psychosis means "A severe mental disorder, with or without organic damage, characterized by derangement of personality and loss of contact with reality and causing deterioration of normal social functioning."
As in schizophrenia.
It does _not_ mean a difficult person, a jerk, a bastard, an arrogant adolescent, etc. Nor does it mean a person obsessed with an ideology and a pitbull determination to inflict it on everyone.
I'm no psychologist, but in my fifteen years as a USENET participant, I have perhaps _twice_ seen postings that I thought might, in fact, actually have been made by someone suffering from schizophrenia. I have yet to see anything similar on Wikipedia.
Words _do_ have meanings.
There are also people who are clearly clinically mentally ill who participate in Wikipedia; pointing that out isn't stigmatizing them.
It's easy to stigmatize them if you talk about it loosely, sure. And I have no problem with anyone who wants to clearly demarcate the difference between "random jerk/flamer/vandal" and "paranoid, schizophrenic, or otherwise mentally ill".
As an example of the actual mentally ill people we have around WP, one regular complainer to Unblock-En-L has come around at least four or five times, and each time large parts of his emails have been the classic distinct "word salad" writing that is very typical of moderately functioning schizophrenic writers. Organized enough to hold a coherent line of thought for a sentence or two, but then immediately off into a completely unrelated topic, with no logical bridge or connection.
My wife has worked with the mentally ill and has a significant amount of college training in both clinical psych and neurobiology. I showed him this guy's email last time and she immediately without prior context suggested that he was unmedicated or poorly medicated and schizophrenic, without my telling her that I'd figured that out a while ago. Sometimes it's that obvious.