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post 8.
response to a friendly off-list message, which i will go ahead and post here in the hopes that a different stroke might work better for different folks. ja.
thanks for the friendly response.
i'm a 50+ year old person with a solid lib arts BA, MA's in math and psych, lots of post-grad study in multiple fields, and years of cross-disciplinary experience as a statistical consultant where i specialized in constructing software and even philosophical bridges between sub-communities of researchers who had all but lost the ability to comprehend each others' ways and motivations.
i understand about high ideals and non-elitism -- i'm a onetime flower-child from a generation of non-elitists.
but WP defeats me, and it's largely because it enforces a regime of dishonest communication, and it's gotten confused about the difference between non-elitism and anti-knowledge-ism.
when i started out, i called a spade a spade. things that any mature adult, not to mention trained scholar, would call obvious vandalism, manifest disruption, uninformed statements, or malformed citation are things that i described in precisely those terms. and all i got was one dire warning after another that you just aren't allowed to say those sorts of things.
i have a life, periodic travel and the arts, i take the breaks that i need. i realized early on that some of the more generic and popular articles were a special hard case so far as their inertia against improvement goes, and i have a large number of non-pop articles that i normally go work on when the pop phil articles seem stuck in mud.
but when a gang of sophomoric meta-puppets start tracking you back to your more quiet lairs just to wreak whatever destruction they can because you committed the sin of correcting their more obvious errors of fact, that anybody can check from the cites you give, or call them on their deviance from WP policy, and when the spineless cowardice or POV-serving connivance of the rest of the local community does nothing to stop it after numerous pleadings on WQA and RFC, then it becomes clear to any non-brainwashed person that this wiki has fallen and it can't get up.
jon awbrey
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