[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[John Reaves]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstition_in_the_pigeon maybe?

--John Reaves

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 2:53 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 06/03/2008, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Maybe this is the gist of the problem. AGF and all that good stuff are
> > values developed on small wikis and it probably still works that way
> > on other wikis like meatball. It may still work here too on the
> > project and article level. The drawback with this is when other
> > wikipedians who you don't know from Adam drop out of the sky and
> > nominate your article for deletion, challenge the fair use rationales
> > of your images, remove your spoiler tags, or otherwise challenge
> > something in your article based on some policy discussion made
> > "somewhere else" by people who you don't know.
>
>
> The strength of "Assume Good Faith" is that it's a good heuristic for
> life in general. Almost all people mean well and are sincere in their
> actions - that's why they're so hard to sway from them.
>
> And *shit happens*, but people are unwilling to accept that it's
> possible - they ignore the ridiculous fucked-up complexity and
> emergent behaviour of evolved systems and keep looking for someone to
> blame. It's the same place conspiracy theories and witch-hunting come
> from.
>
> (I'm looking for a reference to an experiment I read of: birds being
> fed or not at random when they pressed a lever. The chance of being
> fed was determined only by chance, but the birds constructed all
> manner of increasingly elaborate rituals before pressing the lever,
> timing, etc. in an attempt to make the food come more reliably. Does
> anyone know the one I mean?)
>
>
> - d.
>
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