Ruy Lopez (ruy.lopez@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!