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 <BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.
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.
On 12/03/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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?)
I'd point out that quite a few of us who edit Scientology-related articles have *already* had quite a selection of legal threats from the Churh of Scientology in the past ;-)
(None so far. And I even put a piece of OT III on the wiki.)
- d.
On 3/11/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
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?),
jj@cup.portal.com
As was the first commercial spam (Canter and Siegel; I had the displeasure of being the #2 tech person at their secondary ISP).
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,
Hah.
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.
True.