"Fennec Foxen" <fennec(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:3406cd4e04050716174153651c@mail.gmail.com... <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote: The site owner is Juxho. Stan Shebs noticed him blanking some things. I've suggested to Juxho before that he might want to get rid of 142, but he's happy to tolerate him, just deleting particularly objectionable material. 142 has been at consumerium for many months now. 142 is a professional wiki troll. He is active on many wikis. On some wikis he encounters resistance, like Wikinfo or Wikipedia, and on others, he is able to set up shop and write about his philosophy in detail, and edit the wiki's statements of policy and direction to include his own peculiar views. He's been offered free hosting at least twice. But that's no fun. Unless he's stepping on someone's toes while he writes, there's no point in writing. Here's what he told me when I suggested moving off consumerium to a wiki made just for him: --START QUOTE-- Absolutely not. If you attempt such a move, you will be undone. Also if you persist, defamed in ways that reach beyond wiki-space (fair game, as libel of named parties was begun on your "mailing list"). The Content Wiki and Opinion Wiki of Consumerium will have very severe governance problems. The Wikipedia problems are just a prototype or foreshadowing of these. So while it is normal to have no-compromise high-engagement faction-biased discourses like this one (why we would engage), that by no means implies compromise on any principle. Be VERY clear on this: Many people would physically harm you without a bat of conscience for severely reducing the odds of Consumerium or equivalent services functioning as intended, or sabotaging it once "in play". Fair trade matters. (Developing world education also matters, which is why User:Angela is an anathema). That's just fact. You have no doubt seen anti-globalization and pro-fair-trade marches on TV, and some get hurt, and some throw bricks back. Failing to comprehend and avoid Consumerium Governance problems will, in trolls' view, reduce the odds of success. Be absolutely clear: you are making real-world enemies here, Tim Starling. And many real-world enemies do in fact go so far as to kill to protect what they value. No amount of agreement between this typist and that typist will change that in our respective lifetimes. Insistence on technological means of arbitration only escalates the conflicts and makes them worse. "You" as defined by your typings, trollings and "blocks" are therefore not a person, but part of a problem. One we intend to address by any means necessary. Your use of technological power puts you morally in the wrong, by definition. Do not align your body with your tools. It's a fatal mistake, and one most people learn only when it's far too late, when they realize their tools cannot protect them from whatever trolls they sought to silence. You are not owed warnings - from here, it's next stop abyss. The next troll may be armed with something more than truth and typing. Therefore, the faction proposal, to deal with those issues of political dispute where people violently disagree, and will do harm to each other if not channeled into due process that respects factionally defined terms, as such. Pursue it, or ignore it. It too is a technological stopgap. It will work well enough for Consumerium Governance, or m:Wikipedia Governance, but it will not solve all the world's problems. If you seek harmony, you are best to abandon physics, software, and the Internet, and be a better gardener. The world tree is waiting... -- END QUOTE -- -- Tim Starling

On Mon, 10 May 2004 19:01:58 UTC, Mark Richards <marich712000(a)yahoo.com> wrote: [for its own sake. -- my addition] We were; and that was the meaning when it was first used in newsgroups. In applying the term to Larry Flynt's disreputable political move (I take no stance on whether it was a _bad_ political move) is helping to take away the meaning of a useful word; cf. hacker. -- Dan Drake dd(a)dandrake.com http://www.dandrake.com Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. --George Orwell

Caroline Ford wrote: I do not believe that Wikipedia is dominated by anyone, right or left. I think you will agree, Caroline, that it would be extremely unfortunate if any large organization or group, left or right, religious or anti-religious, etc., decided to target Wikipedia with a deliberate agenda of changing it into propaganda. So far we haven't seen that, and frankly I suspect that for any such movement to succeed would be nearly impossible, because we have such a large and diverse userbase mutually committed to fairness. It's interesting that you think that leftists are "more pleasant" -- this has not been my experience. My experience is that ideologues of any kind are too often very tiresome to be around for very long. --Jimbo

How fascinating! I tend to find wikipedia slanted slightly right-wing, with a wide spectrum of people to round it out. It's very interesting that we can get such different opinions of the same group of people. moink

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 01:32, Theresa Robinson wrote: Well, for myself, I consider Wikipedia bumpy rather than slanted. That is there are distinct lumps in the political landscape where a particular location seems to be more extrusively occupied than others. What we should strive for is to get enough of those lumps so we end up with a cobble-stone pavement in the end, without notable potholes. In a philosophical mood; Cimon Avaro

Fred Bauder wrote: There is more to the left than just "communism". That's one of those words that is sometimes used as a conversation stopper; that word has come to carry with it the connotative baggage of something that is evil beyond redemption. Many people who see value in the philosophy of communism are just as disgusted with the excesses of someone like Stalin. They deeply resent those rightists who manoeuvre them into an apparent defence of Stalin then use that as a straw man to discredit all the positive elements of their beliefs. What's wrong with your view is that you are starting from the position that there is a fight in which one of the combatants must carry the day. What you say could be said equally well and equally accurately with terms for left and right interchanged. And that would be equally wrong. Ec

Fred Bauder wrote: Ahhh! You mean just like POV editors of the right. Ec

I'm not ready to accept such a straw-man burden just to offset the right's obsession with maximizing it. But then the right is not innocent in these things either. One thing that characterizes those of us who support NPOV is that we are willing to tale other points of view into account, and not engage in venomous rhetoric to impose an historical guilt on today's individuals just because their beliefs appear to have a superficial similarity to those held by the leaders of certain notorious regimes. Ec Fred Bauder wrote: