[WikiEN-l] Could we tone down the language a bit?

[George Herbert]

On 1/10/07, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> Someone on this mailing recently started a thread:
>
> > Subject: [WikiEN-l] psychosis and wikipedia.
> >
> > I'd love to see some psychology-oriented individual do a case study
> > on what
> > kind of people are attracted to editing on Wikipedia.  What
> > psychological
> > defects lurk behind the computer screens and the keyboards.
>
> Could we please, please, _please_ try to tone down some of the use of
> wildly exaggerated language and hype in this mailing list?
>
> Psychosis means "A severe mental disorder, with or without organic
> damage, characterized by derangement of personality and loss of
> contact with reality and causing deterioration of normal social
> functioning."
>
> As in schizophrenia.
>
> It does _not_ mean a difficult person, a jerk, a bastard, an arrogant
> adolescent, etc. Nor does it mean a person obsessed with an ideology
> and a pitbull determination to inflict it on everyone.
>
> I'm no psychologist, but in my fifteen years as a USENET participant,
> I have perhaps _twice_ seen postings that I thought might, in fact,
> actually have been made by someone suffering from schizophrenia. I
> have yet to see anything similar on Wikipedia.
>
> Words _do_ have meanings.

There are also people who are clearly clinically mentally ill who
participate in Wikipedia; pointing that out isn't stigmatizing them.

It's easy to stigmatize them if you talk about it loosely, sure.  And
I have no problem with anyone who wants to clearly demarcate the
difference between "random jerk/flamer/vandal" and "paranoid,
schizophrenic, or otherwise mentally ill".

As an example of the actual mentally ill people we have around WP, one
regular complainer to Unblock-En-L has come around at least four or
five times, and each time large parts of his emails have been the
classic distinct "word salad" writing that is very typical of
moderately functioning schizophrenic writers.  Organized enough to
hold a coherent line of thought for a sentence or two, but then
immediately off into a completely unrelated topic, with no logical
bridge or connection.

My wife has worked with the mentally ill and has a significant amount
of college training in both clinical psych and neurobiology.  I showed
him this guy's email last time and she immediately without prior
context suggested that he was unmedicated or poorly medicated and
schizophrenic, without my telling her that I'd figured that out a
while ago.  Sometimes it's that obvious.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com