Talk:The Wikipedia Community

Discussion

I don't want to interrupt, but i have little experience with these discussion boards. i'll try to be quick. i've built a wiki and am trying to use it as an educational tool. i'm also trying to reach out to people who have been in the wiki community for a long time and could help me a) learn some history of wikis, b) develop my wiki to be effective and c) spread the word about my wiki. thanks. i'll check back later i guess to see if anyone has responded.

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The Wikipedia Community, so-called, was never documented or described in a file of this name, despite a title for it sitting on the Main Page for quite some time. 24

Actually, it was still on Wikipedia Proper. I moved it here, and preserved 24's comment. --Stephen Gilbert

Accordingly, 24 claims, there is no such "community", and wikipedia is more of a w:commodity market where the delivery of knowledge is determined satisfactory or not due to Governing Ontological distinctions - which, if they upset the distinctor enough, can become via some process of governance the dualistic and enforced Governing Operational distinctions: page renames, reverts, IP bans, etc.

24 further claims that a real community must share w:risk of w:bodily harm, and that the lack of interest by anyone else in defining this so-called "Wikipedia Community" is due to the fact that no such shared risk exists.

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24,

Ok, this is a community. Communities can exist without threat of bodily harm.

watch you prove yourself wrong below 24

I've had three jobs where my job was to build online community. It exists. We are one.

nonsense. I am not one of "We" here. Nor need I be, to do good work on a collaborative project. And, the delusions of your addled employers are not relevant - if it was possible to build online community, presumably, at least one such community would still exist, and you'd still have a job. I submit this is more evidence for my case. 24

A community is a group of people united in a common goal. We are a group of people united in a common goal of creating a free encyclopedia and cooperating together to write NPOV articles. Technology can change the meaning of words over time.

no, not words that are meaningful to real people sharing real bodily risk. Technology here does not change the meaning of words in Palestine or Manhattan where people actually share risk. You have no "common goal" because you have no such grounding, or binding, to the people you claim to be serving - the users.24

24, you seem to not agree with this common goal, therefore you would be considered outside of the community. You're not cooperative. Despite many requests to log in, you still refuse to log in even as a user named 24. I really don't know if you want to help Wikipedia or if you're just trying to waste our time. I can't see inside your head. If you want to stay, you're going to have to abide by our policies and "join" our community, because that's what we are.

no, I don't "have to" do anything that forces me to submit to such idiocy. If you wish to make a Governing Operational distinction, do so, I can't stop you, but do not claim that you proceed directly to that conclusion from a single or simple Governing Ontological distinction like "community". I think rather that you just test people to see if they can tell what hypocrisy is going on, and if they can, then they submit to your control and accept their G.O.D. directly from you. It's a fun game, I know, but I don't play it any more with people with whom I don't share risk of bodily harm. It's pointless.24

If you can't join our community, I'm afraid that it would be better if you left.

you're "afraid", yes, clearly, but you don't know what "better" means, so I can't parse this adequately. "y/our community" is a "dotcommunity", i.e. a fraud, designed to persuade and convince, not to actually defend bodies. 24

I hate to have to say that,

you "hate", you "have to", etc., more control fantasies and delusions.24

but we're trying to create an NPOV encyclopedia here and if you have your own agenda, I'm sure Bomis would be happy to provide you with your own wiki to run. Note: I will not reply to any of your responses to this unless you log in.

your non-reply is good - that suits us both. I don't consider you a person, since you accept non-persons and non-interactions in your non-community as an equal.24

--Chuck Smith

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The best way to deal with trolls in a free Internet environment (like Usenet--or wiki) is to ignore them. Please -- do -- not -- respond -- to -- trolls--just undo his changes, if necessary. But don't respond. I apologize for not having kept that in mind myself. --Larry Sanger

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I do not consider 24 a troll. He has certainly been ruder about asking some questions and raising some issues than a few others who have attempted to address similar issues in the past.

I'll troll this once - I am the best at raising these issues you'll ever see. If you can't deal with them with me here helping you, you can't deal with them, and the problem is with you people. Period. 24

It stimulated a bit of discussion/flame war ala usenet before threats started flying around to ban 24 This may be a violation of the legal responsibilities of the FPL/GPL which our common knowledgebase is developed under.

such a ban would be a Governing Operational distinction. If it is made outside the framework of the documented Governing Ontological distinction it may upset people. But as it stands Larry Sanger is denying that the latter exist, and Jimbo Wales claims that they exist only in his own head. This is quite typical for an early stage band without even tribal elders yet.

I certainly did not agree anywhere (other than via the labor intensive

method of deleting or modifying my contribution at will) to allow Larry Sanger or Bomis to arbitrarily and selectively ban who can or cannot access my contributed content.

I think that if these agreements you have with them are broken then you may consider it within your rights to take the content away without reference to the license. But we are not there yet. As I understand it IP bans are to prevent editing, like a page lock. Not to prevent reading.

Part of what I find exciting about the project is the ability of currently 200 million but hopefully soon 6 billion internet users to leverage off each others contributions. While some fragmentation or forking of the total available mind share may eventually be necessary; I tend to agree with others that we should avoid premature or unnecessary forking. w:user:mirwin

if this one clique of "dotcommunitarians" wishes to leap directly from (felt then rationalized) ontological distinction to (acted on) operational distinction, I would say that a fork is neither premature nor unnecessary, but critical to the survival of the database in any coherent form at all. Edit quality will descend drastically the minute a clique takes over that has lost its ability to distinguish the ontological from the operational. It may be a duty to rescue the DB in a snapshot state before that.

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mirwin, first of all, I'm just giving advice. I no longer have any official capacity in Wikipedia; I'm not even a sysop anymore. Second, you, too, are a troll, and it's time somebody said that.

"are", "troll", "sysop", these would be part of Larry's w:foundation ontology.

(Actually, I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one.) And I heartily encourage that Wikipedians continue to do what they have been able to do pretty well so far, viz., ignore you, except to undo the damage that you occasionally do. More than enough said! --Larry Sanger

"damage", "ignore", more useful terms. We may figure this one out yet.24

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How much of my content have you reviewed and by what criteria to arrive at the allegation that I am a troll? You seem to contradict your own allegation by saying the damage I do "occasionally" is repaired by others. Is the value added more than the cost of repair? If you think merely questioning the phrasing or proposing additional materials, links, alternate views, or occasionally writing poorly or about poorly understood material of interest because I happen to be on an incomplete or apparently shoddy (draft, unfinished, incomplete, ignorant, written by someone of completely different cultural bias etc.) page that I think (perhaps mistakenly) I can contribute productively too .... then perhaps P'hd's in Philosophy are easier to acquire than my previous impression.

Are you familiar with basics such as ad hominen attacks?

user:mirwin

• Mirwin. I have to say that I do not believe you are a troll, at least how I define one, and as such feel that Larry may be lumping you unfairly with 24.
  • I think so, too, but this is typical of Larry's ontological confusion 24

• I've looked at your contributions list when I saw the allegation, and the random checks I did show that your contributions have been useful for the most part. I'll say why I think 24 is a troll though and then will not address 24 directly or indirectly from this point on. The wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia in which the topics are not original research, or original thoughts. Much of what 24 seems to do is to take concepts, apply them to something else, and call the frankenstein combination something that doesn't show up on any internet searches and doesn't give sources where the phrasing has been used. It does this repeatedly.
  • something vaguely resembling this fraudulent representation has happened maybe three times, and in each of those events, e.g. w:bioregional democracy, w:embodied philosophy, the concept was eventually shown to exist and be relatively well understood - only one or two concepts failed the test, being too new, and surely that's a normal event here. Meanwhile, true garbage such as that written about September 11, 2001, or various Larry-isms, notably his disembodied case-less action-less concept of ethics, persist without any real scrutiny. The most heavily attributed articles have been the ones most immediately attacked and censored. So, this suggests, that there is nothing more than a censorious cabal attacking what it is afraid of 24

• It calls what it is doing a war against those who disagree.
  • no, it calls it a war against those who claim one set of ethics and apply another - hypocrites - those who let each other get away with whatever level of intellectual dishonesty because they are in a clique with history together - golfers you might say, letting each other cheat on their score 24

• To be honest, I don't care if 24 is right in its beliefs. If what it posts is against the theme of this place... (an encyclopedia remember) then it is not contributing anything except confusion and false information. That is why I think it is a troll.
  • confusion and falsehood are the specific domain of the disembodied, and it was they who started the "war", not I, I seek a political solution, but every attempt at discussing even the simplest concepts of governance is evaded and hidden in favor of ideological means, e.g. reference to the holy NPOV. 24

• You do not fall in that category, as far as I can tell, although you do attempt to find a way to incorporate some of 24's ideas into the Wikipedia. Nothing wrong with that if they can be incorporated without relying on new ideas or new terminology. That's my longwinded way of saying that I disagree with Larry on this based on what I've seen.

• Larry, I do want to say that I do think that you are being attacked unfairly by 24 also, I appreciate what you've done here and the desire to protect something you've spent a great deal of time on. I wasn't here before you left, but am glad you're back based on what I've been able to glean about you. Rgamble
  • The very first statement Larry made to 24 was an attack. The very first. That is another definition of a troll - attack first, sort out truth later. Larry deserves the most profound and abusive forms of maltreatment imaginable, and not just here online, where he seems to live, but on the street. He is one of those "Stupid White Men" who thinks he can ignore the world to death, profiting from its demise. It's obvious from his terrified attempts at censorship. However, it is not my duty to give him what he so richly deserves. It is simply my duty to destroy his concept of truth. 24

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I have a request. This may not be the right page to ask it, but I can’t find any other page that is suitable. I’m all in favour of the creation of free content. I feel that I’ve got lots of knowledge and ideas that I can contribute. The problem is, while I would like to provide this knowledge free, I have to earn a living and support a family. Therefore, I need that knowledge to earn me a living, and I don’t have much spare time. I’ve been browsing through websites and articles relating to Open Content and Open Source, and this seems to be the dilemma that no-one dares discuss. Anyway, I’m sure that’s not the case. I would be grateful if someone could point me to where this issue is under discussion, or articles that cover it. Thank you. --Jmhannan

I do not think this is discussed anywhere on meta. Or I have personaly no memory of any such discussion. I entirely agree with you, in this that I also have a family to support, and any minute I give to wikipedia is one less for my family or for my career. Which is why I resent it particular strongly when I am losing my time and energy with hassles and trolls and generally speaking people who are here only to make messes and spoil the fun. In terms of content offering (what you call knowledge), I chose to rather strongly separate my pro life with wikipedia, if only because that could also get me in troubles :-) More generally, I would say that what might be done is to provide basic knowledge here, and for a contributor, to sell this knowledge with the addition of more knowledge and your particular wisdom with it. In short, to give information to wikipedia, then to use wikipedia information as a background of more specialised knowledge you may have to offer. I think many people do not have this question in mind, either because they give content that can not be useful for their professional carreer (thinking of all those taking care of articles on movies, news, american cities...) or because they are still students. Anthere 11:06, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Community Project

THIS and THAT context

Before I was aware of the full purpose of meta, I created a w:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Community. I've tried to define it and prime it some relevance, but without ties to THIS The Wikipedia Community it is basically worthless.

I'm hoping the breach between Wikipedia Proper and Meta can be repaired. It may be nice to have a w:The Wikipedia Community page that links to a community-building project so that people without meta.wikipedia accounts can work in THAT context

Thanks in advance for your help on this matter. Quinobi 16:28, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

...10 months later

What an overwelming response! Thanks a heap!

After all this time, I've managed to establish (In my community of nearly one soul) a mechanism for measuring meritocratic activities based on a model I call m:BabyWikipedia. It is a constrained context MediaWiki application with some extensions that produce various operators, functions and methods for the distribution of wealth and priviledge within an online society. A society, I have decided, is only a step up (or down) from a community, but differs in that intention, interest, practice and expertice are guaged in an ostensible manner. The metrics involved have to do with activity and effectiveness in addition to consensus and popularity.

Take a look if you have the balls.

Quinobi 18:16, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Wiki-stalking link

I removed this link because the author had the misconception that the history window displayed seconds rather than minutes, and seemed to have an axe to grind (I don't know any of the people involved, but it definitely sounded biased). GreenReaper 18:00, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Does page title violate WP:CAPS?

Does the page title: "The Wikipedia Community" violate w:WP:CAPS? I don't see why "Community" should begin with an uppercase "C." Also, is the leading article "The" necessary? That seems to violate w:WP:TITLE. Perhaps the article name should be: Wikipedia community. It seems a number of pages on Meta have titles that violate w:WP:CAPS. Similarly, a number of talk page comments lack proper signatures, i.e. many users do not end their comments with the code: ~~~~. Does Meta follow the Wikipedia guidelines? Teratornis 18:50, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Page protection? For IP disruption? I wish our wiki had this small level of IP disruption

There are 17 posts on this page, four of them from IPs. That's over a four year period. The last IP was posted a proposal to raise awareness about private networks. Where's the disruption? Am I missing something here? --Rob 16:49, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a social club

This phrase redirects to this article, yet there is no mention of this phrase or policy in the article. Was it deleted? Tyciol 17:37, 19 June 2008 (UTC)