[WikiEN-l] The ongoing trolling

[David Gerard]

Ruy Lopez (ruy.lopez at mail.com) [050709 15:25]:

> If I would say I'm surprised Wales has weighed in the way he did on this
> matter, I would be lying.  I have seen the way he has treated even admins
> like Secretlondon.  I have seen how only admins like 172 get their
> adminship removed.  Not to mention all of the users who have not become
> admins (not like anyone who falls on the side of the political spectrum
> that Secretlondon or 172 does could ever become an admin nowadays). 


I largely agree with 172 and Secretlondon politically, and Jimbo and I get
along fine. I wonder why that is.


> Or perhaps I'll just come out and say it: those who are politically
> pro-labor, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, what is sometimes called
> the left, are, I wouldn't even say marginalized on Wikipedia, but
> attacked.  Those who are anti-labor, pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist,
> or what is sometimes called the right, are given adminship, made
> bureaucrats and whatnot.
 

At this point I stopped reading, because you're transparently talking
delusional rubbish.  I 'm a stereotypical Guardian-reading It's-Grim-Up-North-
London [1] wet socialist liberal, I probably disagree with Jimbo on everything
politically, and I consider Ayn Rand and Objectivism material for standup
comedy [2]. But somehow we get along and work together pretty well on the
actual project of writing an encyclopedia. I wonder why that is. Do you
have any hypotheses?

(I think here of Usenet newsgroup aus.politics, back when it was marginally
readable, where the division was not between left and right but between
the sane and the crackpots.)


> And why wouldn't it be so?  Wales himself is a capitalist, and an
> American.  What kind of encyclopedia would one expect to result from the
> structure put in place by an American millionaire after all the money he
> made on pornography and whatnot?  Wales sometimes feels he has to
> position himself above the fray, but the history is clear.  Meaning his
> actions, such as the attack on Secretlondon, not his noting how he was
> enthralled with Ayn Rand as a student and that sort of thing, although
> I'll consider those sorts of things as circumstantial evidence.


If you aren't Xed, you're channelling him. Actually, I don't think you are;
I do think there's a rich well of nutters out there. But [[Crank (person)]]
explains the phenomenon as applied to the Internet admirably.


- d.


[1] [[Private Eye]]
[2] http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Fountainhead_Earth - inspired by Kurt
    from #wikipedia, God love him, who argued that Rand had *conclusively
    disproved* the work of mere know-nothing mathematicians like Godel and
    Turing. At which point he was kicked. TODAY'S FEATURED ARTICLE ON
    UNCYCLOPEDIA!