[WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

Tue Jun 20 13:46:39 UTC 2006

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post 8.

response to a friendly off-list message,
which i will go ahead and post here in
the hopes that a different stroke might
work better for different folks.  ja.

thanks for the friendly response.

i'm a 50+ year old person with a solid lib arts BA,
MA's in math and psych, lots of post-grad study in
multiple fields, and years of cross-disciplinary
experience as a statistical consultant where i
specialized in constructing software and even
philosophical bridges between sub-communities
of researchers who had all but lost the ability
to comprehend each others' ways and motivations.

i understand about high ideals and non-elitism --
i'm a onetime flower-child from a generation
of non-elitists.

but WP defeats me, and it's largely because
it enforces a regime of dishonest communication,
and it's gotten confused about the difference
between non-elitism and anti-knowledge-ism.

when i started out, i called a spade a spade.
things that any mature adult, not to mention
trained scholar, would call obvious vandalism,
manifest disruption, uninformed statements, or
malformed citation are things that i described
in precisely those terms.  and all i got was
one dire warning after another that you just
aren't allowed to say those sorts of things.

i have a life, periodic travel and the arts,
i take the breaks that i need.  i realized
early on that some of the more generic and
popular articles were a special hard case
so far as their inertia against improvement
goes, and i have a large number of non-pop
articles that i normally go work on when
the pop phil articles seem stuck in mud.

but when a gang of sophomoric meta-puppets start
tracking you back to your more quiet lairs just
to wreak whatever destruction they can because
you committed the sin of correcting their more
obvious errors of fact, that anybody can check
from the cites you give, or call them on their
deviance from WP policy, and when the spineless
cowardice or POV-serving connivance of the rest
of the local community does nothing to stop it
after numerous pleadings on WQA and RFC, then
it becomes clear to any non-brainwashed person
that this wiki has fallen and it can't get up.

jon awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey
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