Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:49:05 -0400 In-Reply-To: bdb.12001f33.3326033a@aol.com (Bartning@aol.com's message of "Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:13:30 EDT") Message-ID: 868xe32kb2.fsf@elan.rh.rit.edu User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/22.0.95 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed --text follows this line-- Bartning@aol.com writes:
In a message dated 3/11/2007 2:19:59 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com writes:
In essence it *is* a popularity contest as Sarah suggests. I
have no
interest in learning how to expand my popularity or add others
to my
list.
I would see it as an 'avoiding unpopularity' contest, to some
large extent.
Our conduct rules reward staying out of conflicts, and staying
very calm and
detached when you are in them. This makes sense, to me. It's a
working
environment.
It's worse than a modern academic environment. Articles attack,
don't
interrelate, citations get improperly cited and improperly
ignored. It's worse
than the USENET because at least on there you can't get blocked,
and I see even
worse cases of unfairness there. Wikipedia has only taken
what's bad with
the USENET it seems to me right now, and it's even gotten some
unrealistic
publicity lately.
Vincent
No. USENET was/is a lot worse. Spam is permanently a fact of life there (wasn't the first ever piece of spam a Usenet message?), they invented the trolls and are trolled by Scientology to a more significant degree than Wikipedia (when was the lest time you heard of User:Anon.penet.fi being sued by the Church of Scientology on the wiki?) And they have real cabals on Usenet, not to mention the whole idea of canceling posts, cross-threading, etc. Say what you will about Wikipedia, but it's a much more pleasant, less volatile and less transient place to work. The two are different fundamentally, anyway.