[Wikipedia-l] Look Who's Using Wikipedia

[Berto 'd Sera]

HOI!

>The en.wikipedia is strong on Pokemon, when there is an invasion of 
>these creatures we know all there is to know about them. :)

ROTFL! This is one of the funniest ways to tell a tragic truth I've ever
seen :) It's true. Once again, a wiki is but a reflection (a summa, if you
like latin) of the community writing it.

In the middle ages monks would write a lot about proto-martyrs that did not
even exist, in the current middle ages us monks like anime... virtual sex
happens to be an eternal human feature, ever since Aphrodite was invented
and people could dream of Her and Apollon :) 

The Wikimedia tribe did not invent our carelessness for enemies either.
Subject like Iran are not interesting to westerners AND are little
self-promoting. There is a big number of Iranians who speak English, I don't
see much activity from them, either. As it often happens, the Byzantine and
the Parthian emperor will probably ignore each other until a weird Arab guy
won't kill them both. It's a pity for our will to influence society by
spreading awareness and culture, but it's also a reflection of what our
societies really want at ground-zero level. 

As per wiki-layering, possible split editions and Committees... there never
was a human society that did not evolve into a class layering system. The
problem is that here we do not have anything that will protect anyone from
arbitrary moves from the "powers". 

That is, nobody knows what the Board can do but basically we all think they
are local Tamerlans. In reality it's more like Ceasars, because they do
depend from the popularity they get among us plebeians. If we got upset, we
could get rid of them. But there are NO written rules. So it's all a matter
of negotiating the mood of the judge. We love to talk about anarchy and
democracy but... in reality we just moved from the fortunate period of King
Jimbo to a kind of large triumvirate and have no Magna Charta whatsoever.
Isn't this interesting?

BTW, saying that we are "plebeians" is but a giant lie. Plebeians work out
there making up links and articles, while us senators sit here and complain
that the House of the Emperor is centralizing too much power... There ARE
barriers to an enlarged participation. One is the English language; the
other is what in the old times was called "social engineering". That is, the
capability to get something from the people. Not everyone is capable to do
it, so not everyone will want to (be capable to) be a senator, in real life
as here. So that 0,5% of people who sit here and read meta can hardly be
labeled as "plebeians". And yes, since language capability and social
(should I say "political"?) attitudes are mostly the product of family
education... chances are that our places will be transmitted to our kids.
Let's be real about it. Wikipedia is just a bit of life, and life is like
that. We may want to change it (I do) but then we have to work on it, and
not simply be ironical about it. 

Anyway, wikipedia is also just another living human society. As all such
bodies it has a living cycle. It has been young, now it's getting older. One
day it will die, and it will spread its kids in virtual space. There's
nothing wrong with it, it's the way Nature works. It applies to languages,
nations, political parties, religions and Carnaby Street's miniskirt fad,
too. 

Technology will get older and the wikimedia machine will look simply
ridiculous (as a visicalc looks today). So you can also get ready for the
time in which we will have to think about migrating content to more
"contemporary" platforms (kids at that time will say "not fossile"), while
people will have PHP emulators run a "real wiki" on their machines. It's
happened with pacman, it will happen with us, too.

Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html