On May 6, 2006, at 9:18 AM, Thommandel(a)aol.com wrote:
Have you ever given even a thought to those of us who
read your
encyclopedia? How come I never once heard the word "reader"?
Could it be because the
thousand or so hits a day are from editors only?
Doubtful, we're among the top 20 websites on the Internet. If you
never hear us talk about the readers, you aren't paying attention.
I "stumbled" across Wikipedia looking for
information on Plasma
cosmology
via Google. I was astounded at your so-called neutrality. Not only
did the
article define plasma incorrectly, the POV was obviously biased
against plasma
cosmology. Not to mention the very poor writing. So I really
thought that one
could make the necessary corrections but guess what? After spending
an evening
posting the corrections, they were simply reverted.
I don't know anything about cosmology. I do know something about
bias--since you are biased towards plasma cosmology, perhaps
neutrality is perceived by you as a negative bias? I know that
Wikipedia tends to avoid giving undue weight to non-standard theories.
So did you research my complaint? Or did you just
assume that
because I
complained I had to be in the wrong?
The following complains are almost never taken seriously because most
of the people who offer them are kooks:
1. The admins are abusing their power, and I'm really a good editor.
2. My fringe scientific theory isn't fairly represented in Wikipedia.
You're offering complaint #2. I'll be square with you: we tend to be
dismissive of people who offer complaint #2 because most of them are
kooks. Proving you're not a kook requires calmness, civility, and
refraining from being as much of a prick as you're being right now.
I confined my subsequent efforts to the talk pages,
never fell for the
revert trick, and when they started to remove stuff I wrote on the
talk page, and
I suggested that if they did that in the real world they would be
taken to
court, they blocked me. Twice.
Because such remarks are completely useless and counterproductive and
only contribute to the perception of you as a kook. You're digging
your own grave here, brother.
Does Wikipedia have any notion of what ethical
behavior is?
Yes.
So you are a private company, and you can do as you
damn well
please. (Why
the .org?)
Because we're a non-profit private company.
Your encyclopedia is not "free" it is run by
the powers to be, You
joke
about the "cabel" but what do you do about it?
We joke about the cabal because it doesn't exist, despite numerous
accusations from crazy people and repeat trolls that it does.
You support each other as if an admin can do no wrong.
We have some damn good admins. If we're weighing who we trust more,
an admin, or some guy off the street who seems to be a physics kook,
we trust the admin. So far you haven't been calm and rational enough
to overcome that bias.
You have no control of the admins, and they don't
expect any.
We've desysopped several admins in the past for abusing their
privileges.
You have no ethics program in place. There is no such
thing as
ethics in Wikipedia. Ethics is a joke.
We don't think in terms of ethics because the problems facing
Wikipedia are pragmatic, not ethical. Ethically speaking, the only
concerns are (a) civility, (b) the right to fork, and (c) the right
to leave. As long as we respect those three things, it would be
perfectly ethical of us to, say, remove all mention of fringe
scientific theories. It's not pragmatic of us to do so, but it's
perfectly ethical.
Hell, it's perfectly ethical for Jimbo to just block everyone he
doesn't like.
In the real world, the police are not above the law.
They have to
stop at
red lights just like the rest of us. They cannot steal just like
the rest of us.
They are expected to set examples, their standards of conduct are
actually
higher than the rest of us. And they are accountable to the rest
of us. But
in Wikipedia, the police are accountable to no one. They can and
do form
groups which support each other.
Admins aren't police. Admins are people who can block people from
editing a website and delete articles. To even compare admins to
police is lunacy.
--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch