On 2016-03-12 6:31 AM, Anthony Cole wrote:
I've lost track of where that's at.
Well, there was a consultation involving too few people that had a slight majority picking every other year out of a set of constrained options; followed by quite a bit of protestation; followed by the chair of the selection committee responding that the consultation will be given "all due consideration".
I've very little doubt - knowing the selection committee people and their involvement in Wikimania since Frankfurt - that the so-called consultation /will/ be given all the consideration that it is due: very little, and a bit of chuckle.
:-)
-- Coren / Marc
Thanks, Marc. That's a relief.
Anthony Cole
On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 9:45 PM, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 2016-03-12 6:31 AM, Anthony Cole wrote:
I've lost track of where that's at.
Well, there was a consultation involving too few people that had a slight majority picking every other year out of a set of constrained options; followed by quite a bit of protestation; followed by the chair of the selection committee responding that the consultation will be given "all due consideration".
I've very little doubt - knowing the selection committee people and their involvement in Wikimania since Frankfurt - that the so-called consultation /will/ be given all the consideration that it is due: very little, and a bit of chuckle.
:-)
-- Coren / Marc
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Hoi, When it is only a nominal consideration but mostly a chuckle, what does it say about the validity of those people and their assumptions? This is exactly the infuriating kind of response that turns people off the community. Thanks, GerardM
On 12 March 2016 at 14:45, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 2016-03-12 6:31 AM, Anthony Cole wrote:
I've lost track of where that's at.
Well, there was a consultation involving too few people that had a slight majority picking every other year out of a set of constrained options; followed by quite a bit of protestation; followed by the chair of the selection committee responding that the consultation will be given "all due consideration".
I've very little doubt - knowing the selection committee people and their involvement in Wikimania since Frankfurt - that the so-called consultation /will/ be given all the consideration that it is due: very little, and a bit of chuckle.
:-)
-- Coren / Marc
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Gerard not sure what you mean? In the Wikipedia world if a RfC is either poorly formed or poorly participated in than it is not uncommon for another one to occur.
J
On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 11:35 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, When it is only a nominal consideration but mostly a chuckle, what does it say about the validity of those people and their assumptions? This is exactly the infuriating kind of response that turns people off the community. Thanks, GerardM
On 12 March 2016 at 14:45, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 2016-03-12 6:31 AM, Anthony Cole wrote:
I've lost track of where that's at.
Well, there was a consultation involving too few people that had a slight majority picking every other year out of a set of constrained options; followed by quite a bit of protestation; followed by the chair of the selection committee responding that the consultation will be given "all
due
consideration".
I've very little doubt - knowing the selection committee people and their involvement in Wikimania since Frankfurt - that the so-called
consultation
/will/ be given all the consideration that it is due: very little, and a bit of chuckle.
:-)
-- Coren / Marc
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On 2016-03-12 1:35 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
When it is only a nominal consideration but mostly a chuckle, what does it say about the validity of those people and their assumptions?
I should say that it says more about the (lack of) validity of the RfC itself, Gerard. To be fair, while I applauded the *idea* of doing a consultation about the future of Wikimania in substance and in form, what actually happened - a very quiet poll involving three preset options that weren't even satisfactory to the very small number of participants - cannot possibly be interpreted to reach conclusions to reshape the biggest community event of the movement.
I'm all for a proper consultation. This wasn't it.
-- Coren / Marc
Hoi When this is it, when these people get away with it, their behaviour is as bad as much of what we have seen lately. I do not care who they are. There is too much going where people decide on policies and effectively destroy our culture.,
We do no longer care about our quality, it is all about what others have to do. It is all about determining for others what is good for them. The resulting negativity has a lot to do with demanding influence and meddling with what works by some. Some of the trappings of influence may be exposed like information about the deliberations of the board but then what?
The board is not at the apex of our community, we are the community. Most of us do care about issues that are real. But when real things happen apparatchiks do not care; it is not in their interest. It is why Basel probably died without even a whimper. What is lost in all the huha is care that shows what really matters and is not reduced to the regurgitation of the same old, mostly self serving arguments.
We have so much money that we have money stashed away for a rainy day while at the same time we have millions of well educated people are in refugee camps with nothing to do going stir crazy. We could make a difference there having them edit Wikipedia. It would be mostly languages other than English. Doing this would be good if only to make up for dropping the ball for Basel. Alternatively we could invest all that money in green energy to offset the generation of energy with fossil fuel that powers all the computers and mobiles of people reading Wikipedia.
As an organisation we have been beaten into a pulp with words. Arguments are only accepted when they come with a long list of sources. These same sources are often what holds us back. A psychiatrist was sentenced by a judge [1] because he argued that a caring psychiatrist will improve the results for a patient. Later research more than vindicated him. The point being sources exist and their point is often very much wrong. Our culture of sources prevents our thinking.
That chuckle is so infuriating because it exposes what is wrong with us. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/02/wikipedia-peter-breggin-power-of....
On 13 March 2016 at 00:58, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 2016-03-12 1:35 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
When it is only a nominal consideration but mostly a chuckle, what does it say about the validity of those people and their assumptions?
I should say that it says more about the (lack of) validity of the RfC itself, Gerard. To be fair, while I applauded the *idea* of doing a consultation about the future of Wikimania in substance and in form, what actually happened - a very quiet poll involving three preset options that weren't even satisfactory to the very small number of participants - cannot possibly be interpreted to reach conclusions to reshape the biggest community event of the movement.
I'm all for a proper consultation. This wasn't it.
-- Coren / Marc
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I wholeheartedly agree with Gerard.
During the conference by the KNAW ( academy of sciences) in Amsterdam when the Wikipedia community received from HM Willem Alexander of the Netherlands the Erasmusaward Philosofy Professer Jos De Mul ( Erasmus university of Rotterdam) , who specialises in the impact of information and communication technology on humans and on culture, said (paraphrased) the Wikipedia and its community looks like a modern religion, with its proper dogma and clergy.
In the 15-16 th century Erasmus and a lot of the learned men of his era sought refuge in the united Provinces of the Netherlands together with the protestants who denied the Pope of the Roman Catholic church the right ro call himslef the sole and infallible and omnipotent representative of God on this earth, and warred about this for 80 years with the catholic kings of Spain.
If we continue to put sourced content before real knowledge, we are no better the flat-earthers who denied the evidence of a round earth circling the sun in favour of the catholic dogma of a flat earth center of the universe.
Currently the Wikipedia encyclopedia is not gathering knowledge, like a candle burning on two sides : on the historic side of the candle the flame makes us lose knowledge that has never been recorded or described in writing; traditional aurally transmitted knowledge, descriptive knowledge about traditions, about history, about regional and local languages that have no written literature, about traditional costumes, music, dances and ceremonies, knowledge stored in family or tribal tales; On the contemporary side we are not admitting knowledge because the scholar is not taken seriously, is not referenced by others. By analogy if wikipeida had existed in the 20th century : contributors could not have written about black holes because the Einstein's theory had not been proven and it would have been all considered speculation, just because a despotic self-serving Wikiclergy would have decreed that black holes were heresy... but on the other hand that same clergy currently does allow disproven superstition to survive as fact on the same wikipedia.
Haven't we learned anything from clinging dogmatically to conventional wisdom instead of allowing creative theories to be tested and either being proven or disproven ?
Derek
On 13-03-16 09:12, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi When this is it, when these people get away with it, their behaviour is as bad as much of what we have seen lately. I do not care who they are. There is too much going where people decide on policies and effectively destroy our culture.,
We do no longer care about our quality, it is all about what others have to do. It is all about determining for others what is good for them. The resulting negativity has a lot to do with demanding influence and meddling with what works by some. Some of the trappings of influence may be exposed like information about the deliberations of the board but then what?
The board is not at the apex of our community, we are the community. Most of us do care about issues that are real. But when real things happen apparatchiks do not care; it is not in their interest. It is why Basel probably died without even a whimper. What is lost in all the huha is care that shows what really matters and is not reduced to the regurgitation of the same old, mostly self serving arguments.
We have so much money that we have money stashed away for a rainy day while at the same time we have millions of well educated people are in refugee camps with nothing to do going stir crazy. We could make a difference there having them edit Wikipedia. It would be mostly languages other than English. Doing this would be good if only to make up for dropping the ball for Basel. Alternatively we could invest all that money in green energy to offset the generation of energy with fossil fuel that powers all the computers and mobiles of people reading Wikipedia.
As an organisation we have been beaten into a pulp with words. Arguments are only accepted when they come with a long list of sources. These same sources are often what holds us back. A psychiatrist was sentenced by a judge [1] because he argued that a caring psychiatrist will improve the results for a patient. Later research more than vindicated him. The point being sources exist and their point is often very much wrong. Our culture of sources prevents our thinking.
That chuckle is so infuriating because it exposes what is wrong with us. Thanks, GerardM
[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/02/wikipedia-peter-breggin-power-of....
On 13 March 2016 at 00:58, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 2016-03-12 1:35 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
When it is only a nominal consideration but mostly a chuckle, what does it say about the validity of those people and their assumptions?
I should say that it says more about the (lack of) validity of the RfC itself, Gerard. To be fair, while I applauded the *idea* of doing a consultation about the future of Wikimania in substance and in form, what actually happened - a very quiet poll involving three preset options that weren't even satisfactory to the very small number of participants - cannot possibly be interpreted to reach conclusions to reshape the biggest community event of the movement.
I'm all for a proper consultation. This wasn't it.
-- Coren / Marc
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On 2016-03-13 10:06 AM, Derek V.Giroulle wrote:
looks like a modern religion, with its proper dogma and clergy.
... I'm sorry. Where did you leap from "this was a badly organized and ill-tought out RfC on which nobody should be basing an important decision" to "put sourced content before real knowledge"?
-- Coren / Marc
I was reacting to Gerard , i did not necessarily take into account the preceding exchange I was talking about the wikipedia in a more general fashion and that refernce to religion was a paraphrased quotation from prof J.De Mul
I sorry if it did indeed leap from the RFC to a more general wiki philosofy/practise side of things but to me Gerards reaction was applicable in tho most general of ways
Derek
On 13-03-16 15:26, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
On 2016-03-13 10:06 AM, Derek V.Giroulle wrote:
looks like a modern religion, with its proper dogma and clergy.
... I'm sorry. Where did you leap from "this was a badly organized and ill-tought out RfC on which nobody should be basing an important decision" to "put sourced content before real knowledge"?
-- Coren / Marc
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