15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by Carrite » Tue Oct 23, 2018 4:52 am

CN wrote:The above isn't a theoretical concern either. Timmy happily lists on his Wikipedia user page the large number of Wikipedia articles he has made significant contributions to. They are primarily about history, and Timmy has previously admitted on Wikipediocracy that the reason he writes on Wikipedia is because he gets more readers than when he was churning out his stuff as a self-publisher. Evidently he has never been able to persuade anyone his stuff is worth giving him an advance or royalties for.


A. Listing articles like that is akin to wearing garlic to ward off vampires. I shouldn't need to lecture you, of all people, that some WP contributors are possessive, others are aggressive, others are nasty, mean-spirited game players. Listing articles like that is a way to say: "Been here, done that, don't try to bully me because I'm not having it." You'll see some other content people doing a similar thing if you look around.

B. Hey, I'm alive for 20 more years maybe. Or less. Writing in one place has an opportunity cost of not writing in another. Wikipedia is an effective use of my time.

C. I don't give a flying fuck about royalties. I've got a contract now with a real, big kids publisher for five volumes @275K words. My consigliere and I have signed away any royalties that may accrue to that project to a non-profit, shoestring budget website that we both volunteer for. I care zero-point-zero-zero about any financial aspects of my writing. I do what I want to do because I want to do it.

tim

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by CrowsNest » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:58 am

Carrite wrote:For criticism to have effect..... the dreaded Wikipedians have to read it......Wikipedia is an effective use of my time........ I care zero-point-zero-zero about any financial aspects of my writing. I do what I want to do because I want to do it.
The genius of Wikipedia, if there is any, is making people like you really believe these words. You don't want to write for Wikipedia, you would much rather be writing for a traditional publisher and be getting paid for it. You know this is the truth. You know Wikipedia is the reason you can't. You are part of Wikipedia. You are the one denying future writers the opportunity of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, just as the Wikipedians before you ensured there was no real market for your stuff.

I don't write for Wikipedians, they're fucking idiots. If Wikipedians reading criticism had any effect on Wikipedia, it would be fixed by now. The culture and the product would be light years ahead of where it is now, seventeen years into their existence. You said it yourself, although you probably didn't appreciate that was what you said - Wikipedians are in it for themselves. The readers, and their fellow Wikipedians, indeed the entire world, can go fuck themselves if they are not happy with what they do. They only care whether you are of the body, a believer. This is their truth. This is your truth.

This is how cults work Tim. There's no changing it, no reforming it. No change to Wikipedia occurs unless it maintains the interests of the cult. Just like Scientology, Wikipedia usurped its leader, turning him into a powerless figurehead. Someone for pseudo-critics like yourself to rail against, while the people with real power get on with the real business of maintaining the integrity of the cult. Part of which is ensuring people like you keep believing what you wrote above.

There only things you are in control of, is how much you contribute in any given time period. Everything else about your existence as a Wikipedian, is out of your hands. You are a digital version of a battery chicken. All they had to do was figure out the right kind of corn to feed you. And not even battery chickens pay for the privelage of being a battery chicken!

Having pseudo-critics kludge up a Wikipedia criticism forum with a combination of mindless cheerleading and off topic nonsense, is of course something the real believers have absolutely no problem with. Even better if you yourself think you are achieving something by it.

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by Carrite » Tue Oct 23, 2018 1:33 pm

CN wrote:You don't want to write for Wikipedia, you would much rather be writing for a traditional publisher and be getting paid for it. You know this is the truth. You know Wikipedia is the reason you can't. You are part of Wikipedia. You are the one denying future writers the opportunity of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, just as the Wikipedians before you ensured there was no real market for your stuff.


You clearly don't understand the difference between a passion with a hobby and commitment to a belief system on the one hand, and commerce on the other. Not everything is about money. I made my bed thirty years ago when at the fork in the financial road in life I chose to take over the family business rather than to go into academia. Was that a good move or a bad move? It's impossible to say. For every tenured history professor doing the research they want to do, there are three or four PhDs that are adjunct professors with no security, chasing the next job, burning up their lives teaching Western Civ to vacant-eyed frat boys...

I am very satisfied with how my life has turned out for me so far. Don't project your values upon me. If I wanted to be a commercial writer, I would be. I am doing what I want to do, the way I want to do it. I spent the late 1990s and early 2000s doing a record label the way I wanted to do it. There were others who chased the golden calf; I did not. There are more important values than money.

By the way, do you really blame WIKIPEDIA for the way that publishing has changed in the digital age? That seems absurd, akin to blaming Craig's List for the disintegration of the newspaper industry or Amazon for the collapse of the bookselling trade or Uber for the death of the taxi industry. There are technological reasons for the way the world has evolved far bigger than any of these individual entities. The powerful entities are indicators of the change, not causes of it. And the new world of these new entities is a mixed bag of positive and negative rather than being wholly good or bad.

CN wrote:I don't write for Wikipedians, they're fucking idiots. If Wikipedians reading criticism had any effect on Wikipedia, it would be fixed by now. The culture and the product would be light years ahead of where it is now, seventeen years into their existence. You said it yourself, although you probably didn't appreciate that was what you said - Wikipedians are in it for themselves. The readers, and their fellow Wikipedians, indeed the entire world, can go fuck themselves if they are not happy with what they do. They only care whether you are of the body, a believer. This is their truth. This is your truth.


Most of the unsung heroes of Wikipedia, the multiple hundreds of backstage content people rather than the 150 or whatever active administrators and like number of non-administrative "names you know" from the drama pages, are committed to spreading information. They are not "in it for themselves," they are in it for the world, they are in it for the cause, they are in it for the end-product. They don't care about WMF and they don't care about Wikipolitics and they don't care about money or recognition or any other superficial metric of "success." They work alone on their own little projects because they want to because they know that the database of information that is Wikipedia is important to the world and that it is a critical vehicle for the transmission of information in this digital world.

Are they self-satisfied? They are if they do good work.

CN wrote:This is how cults work Tim. There's no changing it, no reforming it. No change to Wikipedia occurs unless it maintains the interests of the cult. Just like Scientology, Wikipedia usurped its leader, turning him into a powerless figurehead. Someone for pseudo-critics like yourself to rail against, while the people with real power get on with the real business of maintaining the integrity of the cult. Part of which is ensuring people like you keep believing what you wrote above.


All large and powerful institutions are difficult to change. It is a never-ending process. All one can do is pick away at the edges and do what one can do. But believe this: without getting people who are actually involved with Wikipedia's internal processes involved in making whatever incremental small changes, nothing at all will come from railing at WP on a website. You might as well take off your clothes and go into the middle of the street to try to change the weather by shouting at the sky.

CN wrote:There only things you are in control of, is how much you contribute in any given time period. Everything else about your existence as a Wikipedian, is out of your hands


Oh, people have control not only of when they write, but what they write about. That is the most important thing. If encyclopedia writing were the lucrative job that you insist it would be if there were no Wikipedia, the employee would have choice over neither of these things.

You can take that particular job and shove it, as the old country song goes.

tim

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by CrowsNest » Tue Oct 23, 2018 7:28 pm

I'm not remotely confused about what motivates you Tim. This is not a hobby for you. You are writing on Wikipedia to gain the recognition and readers for your work that other routes could not or would not offer you. You made a clear decision - giving it away for free on Wikipedia is better than earning royalties for work that nobody will ever see, or work that publishers would not even pay you for.

But money is also clearly an issue for you, you clearly resent not being recompensed by Wikipedia for what you lay out in expenses, just like you clearly resent not being able to make money from traditional publishers. You literally had no choice but to use Wikipedia, to achieve your goals. This is not the mindset of hobbyists, they tend to gravitate to niche sites, or even their own site. That's not to say "Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written by people who see writing an encyclopedia as a hobby" doesn't have a certain ring of truth to it, but we wouldn't see a Doctor who practiced medicine as a hobby, etc, etc, hence why it will never be admitted by Wikipedia as the awful truth, its status as a work of amateurs, carrying all the negative connotations of that word, and absolutely none of the benefits.

Maybe you believe in the wider principles and that is why you made your choice, but maybe you don't. Your lack of any real or visible effort in fixing what is broken at Wikipedia, and your apparent happiness that it has and will continue to undermine the traditional model of authors owning their work and being paid for it, particularly when it would have marketable value if Wikipedia did not exist, all suggests to me it is more about what you couldn't achieve as a writer using the traditional model, than principle in general.

You try to deflect blame away from Wikipedia onto the internet in general (the driving force of Uber etc), for the deleterious effect it has had on the world. This has been tried before, by other pseudo-critics. There is nothing bad about the internet culture in general that Wikipedia could not fix internally. In that respect, Wikipedia has a very traditional theoretical model, very unlike the Wild West and automated nature of the internet. The issue is, people like you don't care. You never did care. I sometimes think maybe it only ever was Jimmy Wales who thought Wikipedia would be a professional environment. Mutual respect is useless to people who only care about their own self-gratification.

You refer to the unsung heroes of Wikipedia, like you have some evidence they do what they do out of a conscious choice or a genuine altruistic motive. We know different. We know those people are simply addicts, hooked on the rush you get from instant publishing. There's no higher cause to their efforts, they're simply writing, just like you, for selfish reasons. Noobs aside, of course, they are often misled about the real purpose and true nature of Wikipedia. People who genuinely believed in the sham idea that Wikipedia is the future of knowledge, would be doing more than that. Pick a backlog, any backlog, they would all be seen as priorities by people who genuinely believed in Wikipedia solely for what it can be to the world, not what it can be for them.

It was pretty hilarious to see you even writing this.....
They work alone on their own little projects because they want to because they know that the database of information that is Wikipedia is important to the world and that it is a critical vehicle for the transmission of information in this digital world.
What a strange way to refer to a project whose entire ethos is collaboration and coordination. You did know that is what Wikipedia is supposed to be, right? It isn't, obviously, and that is why it is so crap, that is why only 0.6% of it is up to an acceptable standard according their own metrics.

Everything you have said confirms what you believe Wikipedia to be, especially the last two lines. A giant facilitator of your own selfish interests. You are probably the most Wikipedian Wikipedian I know. And that is why the term is meant to sound perjorative. You are not encyclopedists, you are fraudsters. The general public doesn't have the first clue this is what it is all about for you people, they genuinely think you're doing it for them, they really believe there is some guiding philosophy and coordinated effort. There is, on paper. And that is where it will stay.

There is nothing I can say to a Wikipedian that will change that, no incremental change that makes them less predisposed to the central fraud at work, so why would I even waste my time? Wikipedia has had seventeen years demonstrate it is committed to living up to what it advertises itself to be. For serious critics, the myth is well and truly busted.

What I write here, is written firstly for the victims, the unwitting consumers, and secondly for those who have the power and the motivation to destroy Wikipedia. For there is no fixing it, not without removing the entire essence of what it is by design - free, and built and maintained by Wikipedians.

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by Graaf Statler » Wed Oct 24, 2018 11:05 am

Ming wrote:Given all the people from here who have started popping up there, the message seems to be that the dopamine hit of cogent (or not) writing can't compete with the adrenaline rush of verbal abuse.

You think so, Ming? I don't know. Or is it maybe because those users who come over start to understand they are complete fooled by Wikipediocrazy and the gender desk and Jake because all of that is just a part of the wiki-trollfarm and their troll complex?

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by Carrite » Wed Oct 24, 2018 1:37 pm

CN wrote:I'm not remotely confused about what motivates you Tim.

That I don't doubt in the least — that in your mind you don't have the slightest confusion about what I believe, or anything at all, really. It's almost entirely wrong, mind you, but you've nonetheless got an absolute certainty that anything you believe is correct. It's a form of narcissism.

CN wrote:You are writing on Wikipedia to gain the recognition and readers for your work that other routes could not or would not offer you.

Here's one of exactly two things you've got right — millions of people use Wikipedia every month and thousands of these make use of Wikipedia to gain information on matters about which I have expert knowledge. So I am writing for a broad set of readers, people who would be completely oblivious to anything I produced if it were written for and published in academic journals and small circulation university press books.

CN wrote:But money is also clearly an issue for you, you clearly resent not being recompensed by Wikipedia for what you lay out in expenses, just like you clearly resent not being able to make money from traditional publishers.

Completely absurd. I've been a book collector since the 1980s and a Wikipedian since the closing days of 2008. Why would I "resent not being recompensated" by WMF for my own collection-building that had been going on for decades before? The only issue I raised my own spending on books, microfilm, and associated gear at all was to illustrate what a tiny, tiny part was played by WMF's contribution (gratis access to Newspapers.com and JSTOR) to my my information-acquisition budget.

I couldn't care less about making a nickel off my writing in any form. I don't have an ad on my website, I have made sure to assign away potential royalties in my book contracts, and the only reason I have edited Wikipedia for pay was to gain experience in the process with a view to writing about it someday — money which was donated to charity. I care about money like you care about American football.

CN wrote:Your lack of any real or visible effort in fixing what is broken at Wikipedia...

The fact that you haven't noticed it doesn't mean it hasn't taken place. A more humble phrasing would be: "The fact I've never noticed you spending time fixing what I think is broken at Wikipedia..." But then again, humility was never your strong suit.

CN wrote:"...your apparent happiness that it has and will continue to undermine the traditional model of authors owning their work and being paid for it, particularly when it would have marketable value if Wikipedia did not exist, all suggests to me it is more about what you couldn't achieve as a writer using the traditional model, than principle in general."

Now here is where we get to what motivates you. Somebody is a frustrated writer... It's certainly not me, I'm paddling as fast as I can in the deep end of the pool. And again: the fact that you blame Wikipedia, a superficial marker for or symptom of underlying technological changes in the publishing industry, for a declining market for freelance or professional writing is sort of like blaming the Stanley Motor Carriage Company for the falling pay rates of horse-drawn wagon drivers in the 1910s.

CN wrote:This has been tried before, by other pseudo-critics.

And here again we arrive at one of the fundamentals of your own personality. You and you alone are the savior of the world from the menace of Wikipedia. All others, those who make muted or partial or focused criticism of Wikipedia are mockable "pseudo-critics." Only nonstop and total vilification in the most shrill tone will do. In this you are probably one of three (plus or minus one) humans on our planet. I ask you again, do you really think that such a standard has the most remote chance of building a movement that can actually effect change? Or is it not more likely that you love the sound of your own voice and are addicted to "the adrenaline rush of verbal abuse." (—Ming)

It's not really about Wikipedia at all, is it? It's about proudly flaring magnificently colored peacock tail-feathers and shrieking for all to hear...

CN wrote:I sometimes think maybe it only ever was Jimmy Wales who thought Wikipedia would be a professional environment.

Jimmy Wales has been accused of being motivated by and envisioning many things, but belief that he was creating a "professional environment" is not one of them. Surely you mistake him for Larry Sanger and his ill-starred Citizendium.

CN wrote:You refer to the unsung heroes of Wikipedia, like you have some evidence they do what they do out of a conscious choice or a genuine altruistic motive. We know different. We know those people are simply addicts, hooked on the rush you get from instant publishing. There's no higher cause to their efforts, they're simply writing, just like you, for selfish reasons.

Of course people would rather write for the widely read Wikipedia about their interests than they would spend money to start an obscure blog that nobody sees. How does this make them selfish? Rather, it is a rational and smart choice if one is sharing knowledge. This is the reason you and your ilk can shriek and vilify Wikipedia and Wikipedians in your various cul-de-sacs of the internet to your heart's content and it won't make the slightest difference to the people who keep the encyclopedia improving and growing.

CN wrote:Pick a backlog, any backlog, they would all be seen as priorities by people who genuinely believed in Wikipedia solely for what it can be to the world, not what it can be for them.

Some people write. Some people maintain. Some people are just there for the drama. It takes all kinds.

CN wrote:What a strange way to refer to a project whose entire ethos is collaboration and coordination.

Only Jimmy Wales and the circle of people with snouts in the fundraising trough profess such a huggy-kissy depiction of Wikipedia. Allow me to introduce you to a very smart comment made by Andreas Kolbe at Wikipediocracy in July 2012: "Received wisdom is, too many cooks spoil the broth. Crowdsourcing wisdom is, the more cooks, the better. But in practice, every featured article in Wikipedia is the work of one writer...or a small team. Crowdsourcing does not result in excellent articles."

Most dedicated WP content-writers write in isolation. You don't see their names unless you go looking for them and they could not care one molecule less about Wikipolitics or what you or I have to say about the defects of Wikipedia.

CN wrote:why only 0.6% of it is up to an acceptable standard according their own metrics.

Ha!!! There you go again, making use of Wikipedia stats and definitions to "prove" Wikipedia processes are the cat's meow. There is nothing about the "Good Article/Featured Article" homogenization machine that makes or breaks a Wikipedia article. That approval process is nothing more than a pastime for copyeditors on the make. Wikipedia, in actual fact, is a mixed bag of good and bad articles, of generally acceptable quality and accuracy for most topics. This is why Wikipedia is so well-regarded with the public. This is how WMF is able to raise $100 Million a year passing the hat.

CN wrote:You are probably the most Wikipedian Wikipedian I know.

Thank you. I do mean that. One thing we punk rock fans have long known is that the true believers in the punk/DIY ethic are, counterintuitively, the ones who superficially look the least like punk rockers. This is probably the only other thing you've got really right about me. Everything else is horseshit.

CN wrote:What I write here, is written firstly for the victims, the unwitting consumers, and secondly for those who have the power and the motivation to destroy Wikipedia.


Here you reveal yourself a fantasist. Why are you not attempting to contribute freelance exposés to every media site on the internet if you are truly trying to "help the victims"??? No, my friend, you just like the sound of your own voice and the thrill of denunciation and (anonymously) written abuse.

But enough about me. Let us know your big strategy of knocking off a multimillion dollar public institution with a higher public "approval rating" than the government of any country with the sheer force of your shrill and sectarian words on an obscure website (Alexa global rank: 1,515,392).

tim
Last edited by Carrite on Wed Oct 24, 2018 2:07 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by Graaf Statler » Wed Oct 24, 2018 1:52 pm

Carrite wrote:But enough about me. Let us know your big strategy of knocking off a multimillion dollar public institution with a higher public "approval rating" than the government of any country with the sheer force of your shrill and sectarian words on an obscure website (Alexa global rank: 1,515,392).

tim

Excellent idea, Tim.
Next round about this subject please. And thank you both till now for this great duel.

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Oct 25, 2018 11:31 am

What have I got wrong about your motivation Tim? You admitted it yourself, you are doing it to reach more people, on the apparent basis you believe you are an expert. The only hard data you have, is how many people read your articles. Taking Severi Alanne as a logical starting point, it averages 1 view per day. So it already looks like your claim of thousands of people a month seeking out your content, is dubious.

As for why they read it, have you any reason to believe, or indeed any evidence, that they come away from it knowing more than they did? That they were so blown away by it, they would happily consider you an expert? The Wikipedians got rid of the article feedback tool for a reason. Readers generally think Wikipedia is shit, and your articles were likely no exception. The Wikipedians tired of all the criticism and suggestions for improvement, so they blocked it out and just carried on doing what they think is the priority. As they always have done.

There's a reason you don't give a shit about Wikipedia's own quality metrics, and it is ironic that it is this very narcissism you spoke of. You've got an absolute certainty you're the only person on Wikipedia with the most knowledge of your subjects, and you assume there's nothing anyone else other editors could teach you, not on the subject matter or anything else that is relevant to Wikipedia publishing. Sadly, it is likely true, since I imagine none of the authors of your books can stand their environment, put up with the bullshit, accept the propaganda.

This is why you talk of the practical way Wikipedia is written, as if it was the actual way it is meant to be written. It is your truth. Andreas didn't say anything on that score that I didn't know already, and have written about extensively in various critic fora, but I would disagree with him implying this results in "excellent articles" (and he probably didn't want to imply that anyway, this is likely the result of your selective quoting).

It belies an arrogance of your own that you think I somehow didn't know what Andreas had said. You imply I am dumb, while clearly not having the first clue as to what I have written about on critic fora. I'm not so dumb I didn't immediately spot he said "or a small team". Have you ever worked in a small team to write a Wikipedia article? I'm thinking no. It doesn't fit your motivation.

And focussing only on that quote, while individual Featured Articles are of course not crowdsourced in the sense of more is better (some is better than one, but yes, there is a practical upper limit), the foundational theory of Wikipedia as a whole, is that it only succeeds if there is a buy in from millions of people, who join as editors. That clearly didn't happen. That is why it is so shit. A million people fact checking one unverified statement a day, would fix one of Wikipedia's most obvious problems in short order.

People like you, who pretend like this is someone else's job, are showing they have absolutely no belief in the foundational ethos of Wikipedia. Which is crowdsourcing toward a common goal. Your attitude that your own personal turf is Ok because you're an expert and nobody else needs to worry themselves with checking your work, that the GA/FA system is meaningless rubbish, blah, blah, is the very antithesis of Wikipedia.

All you are there to do, is steal server space and attract a wider audience. Wikipedia is not a webhost, remember? Kindly dispute this with something concrete, something you can actually point to as an example of you being a selfless believer.....because these continuing blind assertions to the contrary, are unconvincing to say the least.

I know what I'm talking about, and that is chiefly what differentiates serious critics from pseudo-critics. We care about being seen to be wrong, because that would impede our effectiveness. You don't. I can of course furnish you with plenty of proof Jimmy envisioned Wikipedia as a professional environment. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales are on the same page, they both see the sort of dogshit that now passes for good behaviour on Wikipedia, accepted and indeed approved of by people like you, and they find it abhorrent. You are not their idea of a Wikipedian. Like the ferret fucker, you look on that with pride. Bizarre.

Larry chose to fix it by creating a better Wikipedia. Jimmy chose to stay the course, in the vain hope Wikipedia can be fixed. You don't need to be a genius to understand why each took the decision they did, nor to understand why both were idiots for thinking they could succeed. Note that Jimmy is not above creating new projects where there is no point trying to fix the broken WMF offering, WikiTribune proves that. It looks like it will fail for the same reason Citizendium failed - you cannot do anything better than Wikipedia, while Wikipedia still exists, monopolizing the market sector.

Being shit but free and popular, to make people think they are indispensable based on a tissue of lies and mythology spread by the very people who have the most to gain by Wikipedia existing forever, people like you, is Wikipedia's truth. It is a cult. Self-preservation for the benefit of the insiders to the detriment of everyone else, even low ranked members (motivating them to give more), is exactly what defines a cult. They literally said in their strategy, their goal is to be ubiquitous. The nominal goal of being accurate, of course being long forgotten.

Your theories of the blameless Wikipedia, just another website, blah blah, are or course just so much bunk. You might as well be arguing Amazon and Facebook had no effect on retail or newspapers. They take their lumps for the mistakes they made in how they transitioned us all to a world of digital commerce and news transmission, yet Wikipedia is always held blameless by the true believers for their clear deleterious effect on how people look at reference works. There are other superior free digital encyclopedias, but they might as well not exist because of Wikipedia's monopoly. It is to blame. You are to blame.

The very idea people donate to it in full knowledge of what it is and how it works, is frankly laughable. That is some Grade A cult mythology right there. Has there been any correlation at all between how much money the WMF has been able to con from people, in particular readers, and any metric at all of its "generally acceptable quality and accuracy for most topics."? You are talking out of your backside, and you know it. Or maybe you don't.

They are creating an endowment so Wikipedia can be self-sustaining precisely because they know fine well there is a very real risk the individual donors at least will eventually wake up to the scam. This is also why they are now shaking down Amazon and the like, on the laughable basis the product has any market value at all. A risky strategy. The last thing Wikipedia needs is to be forcing corporations to start doing sums about exacty what it is they are paying for.

NOTHING you do shows you really care about the wider readership. Nothing. Just like everybody in the movement, corporate or volunteer, although the latter make it far more obvious they could give less of a crap about the mission. What are these "muted or partial or focused criticism"s you supposedly do? I tire of asking for examples.

And given the thrust of your post, you damn well better give an example of a criticism that actually worked. And let's not even go down the road of you criticising me for lacking humility, you would lose that comparison badly. You are a hugely arrogant person, that comes through countless times. You are humble when seen alongside the likes of Drmies, but not when seen alongside baseline humans.

On a final note, don't say stuff like "I care about money like you care about American football." This forum isn't Wikipeidocracy, we don't feel the need to engage in the sort of mindless chit chat about our personal lives that you people do. But if we did, maybe you'd be surprised at my knowledge of all sorts of things. Poetlister, Casliber, the ferret fucker and countless others in the pseudo-critic camp, they've all made laughable statements about what I supposedly know nothing about, claims that I could easily disprove if I was minded to share details of my education and career. Naturally, I am not.

And this reluctance to tie my real life to my criticism of course limits the outlets for my criticism. But you knew that anyway, didn't you? Pseudo critics rail against the things they already know to be false or misrepresented, to make up for the fact they can't address the actual points being made, which is another differentiating aspect to serious critics.

I will repeat, because you seem determined to ignore it, NOTHING I write is for the benefit of Wikipedians, I don't expect or assume it makes a blind bit of difference to what they think or do. Nor am I interested in building a movement. There are countless examples of corporate behemoths being severely hampered by individuals, exposing issues that they can't or won't fix, but manifestly harm citizens. The conditions are out there.

Your chief protection for your bankrupt business model, Section 230, is already being examined in the countries where legislatures do have some level of ethical concern on behalf of their citizens. Your confidence is misplaced, you could barely muster an effective defence against Article 10/13, and that was cast as an existential threat. When push comes to shove, the March To Save Wikipedia (against sensible laws) will not trouble any Traffic Division in any country. If Wikipedia is killed as part of the process of improving the public access to reliable information, who will care, really? It seems clear you will only care if you are personally affected.

You bizarrely find reassurance in our Alexa ranking, but this merely shows you don't have the first clue what the threat it. This is asymmetric warfare. We're not hoping to snare random readers. Google is our friend, we appear prominently on all relevant searches. And where we don't, we are mentioned in all the other sites performing this niche activity. We even get mentioned on Wikipedia, in ways that make it clear to the curious that it is us, not Wikipediocracy, are the people who pose a threat, because we know the truth.

Thanks in no small part to me, writing stuff people want to quote or host, or that Wikipediots are absolutely terrified of. Because it is serious, truthful, criticism. Delivered in a manner/tone that befits the threat. By contrast, your pesudo-criticism seems to only have two markets - Wikipedia and Wikipedocracy. And you are small fish on both platforms, dominated on both by even bigger believers who are even more deluded and/or minded to deceive the public for their own ends.

You claim common cause with Ming at your peril. He'll be prioritised by Wikipediocracy's inner circle over you, all day, every day. You will accept that, or you will be banned. Just like on Wikipedia. You're welcome to post here when that time comes, but your pseudo-criticism won't go unchallenged.

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Carrite
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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by Carrite » Thu Oct 25, 2018 9:12 pm

Wow, that's embarrassing... If this were actually a boxing match, you'd have just treated the spectators to three minutes of racing around the ring with a bloody nose, back to the opponent, blindly windmilling awkward attempts at haymakers at phantoms in the air. I had a higher expectation of you. You are proving yourself to be nothing more than Don Quixote de la Mancha, British edition, while proclaiming yourself one bad-ass dragon-slayer all the while.

Let's review, since it is obvious that you think nobody is gonna notice if you pour a deep enough layer of bullshit...

I wrote:But enough about me. Let us know your big strategy of knocking off a multimillion dollar public institution with a higher public "approval rating" than the government of any country with the sheer force of your shrill and sectarian words on an obscure website (Alexa global rank: 1,515,392).


To which you just spent over 1900 words more or less completely avoiding the issue.

Here's why. You have bitterness and bile, you have an ability to construct sentences, you have heartfelt beliefs (wrong though they often may be), you have a hobby you enjoy — anonymously slagging off on other people for having somehow spoiled what would have otherwise been an oh so perfect writer's life... What you do not have is a viable strategy for turning your vaunted "Wikipedia criticism" into actual change.

You are little more than the embodiment of a Western middle class Maoist-wannabe sectarian, burning flags and chanting "Death! Death! Deng Xiao Ping!!!" as if that is going to somehow change the course of the history of China.

It's a laughable premise.

Nothing you have written, nothing you can write on the 1.5 millionth ranked Website is going to move the needle at Wikipedia or in the broader world one micron. Tell us how that is going to work, Oh Great Savior of the World... How are you gonna turn your prose into action on the part of "those who have the power and the motivation to destroy Wikipedia," as you explicitly stated above?

You've got nothing, so you chatter about esoteric short articles on obscure Finnish-American socialists instead.

And beyond that: tell us more, we've all suffered through more than a thousand posts on this site and probably that many more on Wikipediocracy before you were mercifully banned off... Tell us just who "those who have the power and motivation to destroy Wikipedia" are? Do you mean Team Google? That's really the only plausible answer, is it not?

You've got nothing. No viable strategy, nothing but self-righteousness, anger, and an addiction to the adrenaline of anonymous invective.

tim

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Re: 15 rounds of insults, attacking maneuvers, etc.

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Oct 26, 2018 9:35 am

Any spectators will have no trouble identifying who is ignoring what. But if you want to focus on this one issue, let's do so. I already told you why our Alexa ranking doesn't matter. I already told you quite a bit about who I am writing for, and how they can bring down Wikipedia. If you want more details of our strategy, as some kind of replacement for any kind of answer to the questions about your views and existence, I can of course provide them. Why? Because your hopes that I am a madman flailing in the dark with no hope of success, are sadly just hopes. Just like you hope Wikipedia readers think you are an expert.

Firstly, detailed documentation of the shitty and even psychotic nature of the volunteers, ensures less people are minded to join that community, much less fund it. On that score, we appear to be having an effect. Secondly, by documenting the unchanging if not worsening nature of the community, we will accelerate the departure of the few volunteers who do know how to conduct themselves and did believe in the founding ideals of Wikipedia. Again, we appear to be succeeding.

Outside this strategy of depriving you of your lifeblood, the main threats to Wikipedia are of course, legislation to bring some accountability to what you do, and litigation to ensure you don't feel so free to do what you do. Legislation is already happening, what you fuckers do and how it effects innocent people is being discussed in detail in parliaments across Europe. Our role in that is exposing the ways the WMF and the Wikipedians deceive outsiders as to their true nature. We appear to be succeeding in that too, there was a time when your most obvious lies were believed by outsiders. They are learning.

And it must be us who are informing people, because you jokers at Wikipediocracy certainly do not discuss some of these things at all, and those you do are framed as if Wikipedia is the victim. Basically, we counter your propaganda, bust your myths, tell your truth. Inevitably then, as powerful individual's eyes are opened, as Wikipedia keeps adding itself as a party to all sorts of campaigns, claiming in every single case it is about our human rights to freely consume an amateur encyclopedia, significant litigation will happen by way of retribution, if it isn't in the works already. Strategies have been developed, weaknesses have been identified. Some details are necessarily kept under wraps, but there's plenty on here out in the open to convince you this is happening.

The rest of what we do can broadly be classified as public education, but as said, we don't waste our time on those who don't want to be educated, they're no use to us, we are not building a mass movement. This is perhaps the easiest part of our role, given how miserable the failures of Wikipedia's assorted initiatives really are. Fixed the gender gap yet? Fixed the software yet? Fixed the culture yet? Fixed the ENCYCLOPEDIA yet? No. No. No. No. Your worse aspects, like the closed, vicious and paranoid nature of the community, just keep getting worse. 'Deal with it', or this pathetic plea for more time, is and remains, your only reply. Busted.

People looking for details of how Wikipedia really works, and why it can't be fixed, will be well served by this website. Wikipediocracy, not so much.

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