The Triumph of the Will
and the Jack and the Jane. Of the ordinary person.
A wag once said that only royalty and people with tapeworms could speak as “we”. He forgot bloggers. Although a weblog is commonly supposed to be an intensely personal vehicle free from the strictures of a supervising editor, in reality a weblog must eventually share authorship with its readership. The recent deletion and rapid restoration of the Belmont Club article from Wikipedia is a case in point.
For the record, I never made any representation or appeal to Wikipedia for either its original inclusion, its subsequent deletion and its eventual restoration. These events were caused by the “we” rather than the “I”.
The original entry was due to the millions of hits the BC got. That traffic was bound to include it in some index. And its deletion, and its restoration, partook of the same public nature. The readership, through its efforts and generated “buzz” brought it back. It was big and active enough to do that. God knows I had nothing to do with it. Any weblog is bound to its readers through a kind of feedback loop. Those ties mean that no author, unless he closes comments or entirely unread, is truly the absolute master of his own site. Once online it exists in a context of its own making and that largely defines it.
The Tea Parties are interesting to consider in this respect. Like a weblog they may start out based on a few people but eventually take on a life of their own. Even more than blogs, they evolve a constituency and acquire a distinct character. When this happens they become surprisingly difficult to delete. Those who say “get over it, we won” are grossly underestimating the power of ideas to survive.
For this reason, there may never be a total “progressive” victory in politics, just as probably (alas) the Left will always be with us. A commenter observed that democracies are not simply ‘the rule of the 51% but what the 90% can live with’. Perhaps that is one way to understand the phrase that the ‘meek shall inherit the earth’. Ultimately what triumphs through history is not “today Germany and tomorrow the world!” but “today I go to work and on Saturday I mow the lawn.”
Thanks guys. You did it.
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
Richard,
I noticed that someone at Wikipedia added this remark above the entry for Belmont Club:
This article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (March 2010)
I was one of those that requested Wikipedia to undelete the article. I’ve been reading Belmont Club since the beginning and would like to see it remain on Wikipedia. Any suggestions on how to help establish its “notability”?
*
wretchard,
You are welcome and thank you for all this unremunerated effort.
Walt was right that I blog and no one reads it. So much of what we do is the electronic equivalent of shouting into a barrel. On the BC I spend an hour writing a comment and the thread closes. With no feedback I wonder if it is even read. My Twitter list has 70 followers. Pure spam feeds or portals that never post have a thousand and I get 70? Most of those are not even real people but bots. In my dreams Roger Ailes or Glenn Beck will read these threads and yell at somebody “Hire that guy” but I have enough of a grip on reality to know that is not a strategy or even a hope.
Why blog? It reminds me that I have a mind and experience and I can be productive. It makes me part of a conversation. It reminds me of wonders I have seen and gives me a reason to learn new things, that keeps me young. Perhaps I blog because those who would reduce us all to isolated and ignorant objects wish I didn’t. The Nihilists may want to consign us all to a black hole but each of us can defy them by continuing to speak.
We are not gods descending from the clouds but humans who observe each other and the heavens.
78. Lifeofthemind:
So if I understand you then learning qua learning from any source is valuable even if it is manipulated propaganda, given that even propaganda can teach one that it exists, provided thay have the a priori knowledge to catch the mendacity they read
76. Ignominious
Great link and one that everyone should read. I have been reading Taki for 30 years. He is well informed and usually pulls no punches.
78. Lifeofthemind:
So if I understand you then learning qua learning from any source is valuable even if it is manipulated propaganda, given that even propaganda can teach one that it exists, provided they have the a priori knowledge sufficient to catch the mendacity they read
76. Ignominious
Great link and one that everyone should read. I have been reading Taki for 30 years. He is well informed and usually pulls no punches.
I will always consider Richard Fernandez to be a modern day Diogenes, with lone lantern in hand, traveling the paths of this planet, a seeker after Truth.
After reading “The Memory Hole,” the words that first came to mind were these:
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
“Henry V” W. Shakespeare
I have never been prouder at this moment than to be known as a BCer.
Any suggestions on how to help establish its “notability”?
This is probably the single most critical problem of the Internet. In a growing online world “reputation” — or ‘notability’ — will eventually be online reputation or online notability. An online reputation has become so valuable that it cannot be left to someone, no matter how well intentioned, to assign a value to it arbitrarily. It has to be calculated from the Internet itself.
But to directly answer your question, in the short run a good proxy should be web traffic, link weight (see Alexa) and I would argue that it should include a partial summation of the online ‘notability’ of the commenters. If this site had only five commenters, but they were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvald, etc it would still be something. Or it could have 5,000 commenters many of whom were former rocketeers, business executives, the youngest doctors in America, former intelligence officers and lots of solid and successful people. They might collectively surpass any 10 people on earth in terms of aggregate “notability”.
I think there is already some informal measure of notability. Though poorly defined, the Wikipedia deletion erred in that it’s processes grossly undervalued this site’s “notability”. They misjudged it. The negative feedback they got showed this to be the case. There are some sites which may be overvalued, with big or promoted names which are actually not very good.
The question of online reputation or “notability” is a critical one. For now the best proxy is probably traffic, link weight and the feedback result when someone tries to delete it.
Here’s the short history of the deletion and undeletion of the Belmont Club article (scroll to the bottom of the page for the comments on Belmont Club):
Belmont_Club
* Belmont_Club • ( talk | logs | links | watch ) • [revisions]
Inconsistent application of deletion criteria to articles about blogs -76.115.88.179 (talk) 08:29, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
PROD process did not invite input; the article can be made ‘advertisement-free’ if it is any worse than others of its kind; just needed notification of the perceived need -FChE (talk) 10:46, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
YesY Done – as a contested proposed deletion, the article has been restored on request. Cheers, Arbitrarily0 (talk) 12:27, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Thank you, Arbitrarily0. Let the record show also that the original nominating edit by Scythian77 (talk · contribs) appears to have violated the PROD process by using the unclear edit summary “Added tag”; yet this defect was evidently not regarded as disqualifying by deleting editor Nihiltres (talk · contribs). -AHMartin (talk) 14:29, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
I’m curious. Who is actually responsible here for restoring the Belmont Club article to Wikipedia?
*
I’m glad the wikipedia entry was restored but I think you’re laying it on a little thick Ganymede.
Richard,
For now the best proxy is probably traffic, link weight and the feedback result when someone tries to delete it.
Good response. Here’s another question then. How do we create a link for your blog traffic? Which service are you using to count hits?
I imagine they’re also looking for a profile of you of some kind from another source. Have you ever been profiled?
*
“When Adam dolve [did his digging], and Eve span [did her spinning],
Who was then the gentleman?”
—- Lines used by John Ball in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion. See Hume—History of England. via Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations
Someone always wants to be in the saddle and keep the common people down. It used to be the aristocracy, or the industrialists, or the robber barrons. Now it’s the socialist elites, the clerks, the bureaucrats and their clients. Always some people want to be the “who” sticking it to the “whom.”
Cyberspace is the new town hall. Maybe in the back of every commenter’s mind is the image of Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech.”
http://store.nrm.org/search.htm?searchterm=G60937&step=2
How to restore some kind of balance? Rockwell has a fine image for that also in “The Golden Rule”:
http://store.nrm.org/browse.cfm/4,1540.html
“Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” — Norman Rockwell
Notability in Wikipedia parlance is different from what we would consider notable. You’ll want to check up the Wikipedia policies on notability, and see what they say are sources that qualify. You’ll probably have a bunch of challenges to keeping the page, so watching the page is a good idea. My guess is you’ll see another deletion nomination before long.
One time I was editing Wikipedia, and got in a dispute with another user. I backed off on my edits, and let them have their way. That other user was vindictive, however, and when other users tried to add the information I had added in back to the page, they threatened me and other users with a “Sock Puppet Investigation” (which we were cleared of), which had a real chilling effect on anyone making further edits to the page. As a result, that user “won” by being rude and threatening.
Wretchard – thanks for the quote from Orwell.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.”
This really clears up something I’ve been dancing around as it applies to various groups on the Left
Environmentalists
Feminists
Minority Rights
Gary Rights
Anti-War
Take your pick – it’s not about any of these issues. It’s only about “…power, pure power.”
Totally OT, addressed to Walt:
I just encountered your comment from March 29 (6:16 PM) with the short poem “TO A LOOKING GLASS” — I think the poem is quite beautiful and moving.
Jamie Irons
Nihiltres had a busy day on March 21(from Nihiltres’ Deletion Log):
*16:09, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “The Belmont Club” (G8: Redirect to a deleted page)
* 16:09, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Richard Fernandez” (G8: Redirect to a deleted page)
* 16:09, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Wretchardthecat” (G8: Redirect to a deleted page)
* 16:08, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Wretchard the Cat” (G8: Redirect to a deleted page)
* 16:08, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Wretchard” (G8: Redirect to a deleted page)
* 16:07, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Talk:Belmont Club” (G8: Talk page of a deleted page)
* 16:06, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Belmont Club” (Expired PROD, concern was: This stub article reads like and is an advertisement for a blog/web page. I do not see how it belongs in an encyclopedia. It is neither newsworthy or notable.)
Hm. Anything to do with Richard Fernandez he decided to delete. Interesting.
*
Life of the Mind (#2):
For what it’s worth, I really value your comments here, and I do visit your blog on occasion (I’ll make a point of looking in more often)…
Jamie Irons
A Nobody,
How much transparency is there when most of these administrators use pseudonyms? “AHMartin,” the last guy to leave a comment on the log, does not even have a user page, so who the hell is he?
To be honest, I’ve never really looked at the background to Wikipedia before and I appreciate you giving me a glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak.
I noticed right away today the addition of that “notability warning” above the article — who added that, by the way? — and figured this was probably someone’s preemptive move to once again delete the article on Belmont Club. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s what it looks like.
*
2. Lifeofthemind:
Another reason to blog is that this is a non-linear world.
To return to one of my favorite metaphors, the Battle of Midway:
Six separate American attacks over the course of three hours scored exactly ZERO hits on the Japanese fleet. None of the surviving air crew from those attacks would have any reason to believe their failed attacks had accomplished anything. (some thought they had scored hits, but that’s another matter)
The nearly simultaneous 7th & 8th attacks left three Japanese carriers burning in less than 10 minutes.
You can’t know what you might be accomplishing – keep blogging
I think, personally, it was a test.
To gauge the anger from ‘extremist right wingnuts’. And to further the official narrative.
LOTM:
Hey, I read it. I sometimes disagree with it, but I read it.
The Medieval Warming Period is (or was) entirely missing from Wikipedia due to the climate change gatekeepers being AGW activists.
A lesson plan on Emily Dickinson created under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities (for 9-12) was denied posting to Wikipedia because the grad student handling literature entries objected to the particular image of Emily Dickinson chosen for the lesson plan.
Wikipedia suffers mightily from the fact that so many of its “editors” are young, intolerant, and of very shallow knowledge and experience outside of their area of “expertise.”
Okay, I figured this out. Administrator “VernoWhitney” added the notability warning. You can see the addition here.
And here’s the user page for VernoWhitney. Can anyone make sense of this?
*
Habu,
Thank you, that was well phrased. My only caveat would be to change “is valuable” to read “may be valuable.” Yes I would teach about The Communist Manifesto rather than try to suppress it or leave it out there as tempting as pornography. A competent social studies teacher should be able to do so fairly for the 10th grade. On the other hand I suspect that Mein Kampf is a thornier problem and greater care should be exercised in exposing the average student to it. I own a copy of that book that was published in the United States during WW-II. At that time we were confident enough to make the statement that even wartime rationing was no reason not to expose the ideas of our enemies to public examination.
Children need prior training in how to evaluate sources and we need to worry about the nature of the training they receive. Adults must judge each source for themselves and those who offer criticism of other sources should themselves be seen as competing for attention and credibility within the same market as the sources they purport to judge. Unlike Geert Wilders I would not ban the Koran or hadiths. I wish that more people understood what was really in them. The need to ensure that the instructors are competent and not biased is a real problem and I encourage all of us to be actively engaged in local politics and the oversight of public education.
To tie this back to the theme of this thread, none of us should be comfortable giving any individual, especially but not solely if they have the authority and capacity for exercising lawful violence of the government, with the power to censor and purge our rivals a priori from the ideological marketplace. That power should belong to the collective wisdom of the people as expressed in market.
This does not make me a libertarian absolutist. The addictive quality of pornography and the need to restrict its availability to the young is a real issue. Also there are many cases where the right to speak should not imply the right to compel others to hear. It is my hope that the SCOTUS will find a way to reject the claim that Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church has a right to desecrate funerals and inflict trauma on the grieving.
Dr Irons and Mongoose, thank you.
Jeffrey — New York,
Is there a larger theme here with the Human Rights Watch person’s obsession with military memorabilia and this persons appropriating military ribbons as “Hacker Awards?” The psuedo-militarism of those who hate and fear the real military and the society it defends?
#16 Jeffrey — New York,
There’s next to no transparency, really. There’s the official pages where everything is out in the open, then there are the secret mailing lists where the admins make the real decisions.
The notability warning may in fact be that. The biggest problem I find with Wikipedia is that if someone doesn’t like a subject, or doesn’t like you as a user (or “editor”, in Wikipedia parlance) is that they’ll resort to all sorts of arcane rules and policies to snow you under to shut you up.
WP:AGF, WP:NOTA, WP:SP, WP:Meatpuppets, WP:Canvassing- I’m sure that any of these will be used against the Belmont Club folks who recreated the article or who complained about the deleter of it.
Speaking of deletion, on Wikipedia there’s something called “Deletionists”, or people who believe that Wikipedia needs trimming (despite virtually unlimited capacity), so they delete pretty much anything that isn’t defended constantly. They get off on the power, I guess.
“today I go to work and on Saturday I mow the lawn.”
With my apologies for being off-topic, I am unkind enough to wonder whether your President has, in his entire life, mowed a lawn.
Mal
So Wretchard,
Where are your archives? Before complaining about petty bureaucrats —and snotnosed, pompous little Nihiltres surely qualifies— you should have your own house in order. Where are the conversations from 4, 5, 6 and 7 years ago? You certainly haven’t publically kept them, and neither Blogger nor Google kept them intact either.
As a side note, I notice that GoogleAlmighty® is losing its own information, unable to hold onto its own legacy. History is slipping away the conventional way, not by purpose but by default. Hard drives and backup tapes lost or misplaced, information maintained online but unlinked, or formats become damaged.
Life is for the living. US history isn’t written by the government, and Ford Motor’s history wasn’t scripted by Ford; it is external judges who write it.
So much for digression. Answer this: Where should Belmont Club be? Wiki falls into a few categories: The first category is the subtle lies, the obvious ones are rooted and disputed, but I have never found an unremarkable entry that is wholly true. Of the disputed entries, they become ‘captured’ or dominated by special interests. If enough of the current Belmont-followers become active, they can dominate and keep a ‘Belmont Club Wiki page’. True, it will have lots of information ‘about’ the Belmont Club as its current commenters see it.
But a Belmont Club page in Wiki maintained by BC’ers will be a pack of garbage because —among many other faults— it will have no history; no legacy of where it originated from, its course and direction. It will become one more untruth in the ocean of Wiki.
A Nobody,
Thanks for the inside skinny. That helps me make sense of what’s going on.
I should add that for quick, basic information I use Wikipedia a lot. But it’s good to know how the articles are created (and by whom) and the background politics. Personally, I would like to see real transparency at Wikipedia. Those pseudonyms irk me.
*
Although I did post at wiki to complain, only after complaints were made did they post the procedure on what they call a “refund” of a post
I doubt post carried any weight…
But the value of this blog’s clear headed pov on those issues that cloud the mind in priceless…
22. Lifeofthemind
Many thanks for your thoughtful and always erudite answer.
Addtionally I concur with your statement none of us should be comfortable giving any individual, especially but not solely if they have the authority and capacity for exercising lawful violence of the government, with the power to censor and purge our rivals a priori from the ideological marketplace. That power should belong to the collective wisdom of the people as expressed in market
Finally I must say that which is already apparent. This blog is one fantastic education. So many fine contributors and a host without peer.
Best,
Habu
Jimbo #12 wrote:
“Environmentalists
Feminists
Minority Rights
Gary Rights
Anti-War
Take your pick – it’s not about any of these issues. It’s only about “…power, pure power.”
——————————————————————–
Jimbo, I was just talking to Gary and he’s real hurt to have been included on your list there!!!
(lol, okay I don’t usually pick on spelling but this was just too delicious to ignore!!!)
This thread makes me feel right at home; Rockwell is my favorite artist (a print of Freedom is hanging in my classroom in fact), and Jimbo’s mentioning lessons from The Battle of Midway brings back a very moving moment in my self-education. I’d managed to get through high school without a solitary minute studying WWII, perhaps it wasn’t in the curriculum, and in my twenties was drawn to books on military history. Late one night I found myself unable to put a history of the Pacific War down, and by the quiet wee hours before dawn, reached the chapter on Midway.
I can still feel the tremors and tears of that moment, when the author abruptly stopped his action narrative, and devoted two full pages to list the names of each aviator who rode those cumbersome and almost helpless torpedo bombers to eternity. ‘Don’t ever forget these men, what they bought with their lives, and what they established by their selfless devotion. To a man, they define bravery and conviction. As hot tears splashed onto the yellowed pages of that old paperback, I began to call out each name in the early morning silence, and have rarely felt alone since.
I have to think that in time, each of those men came to understand the significance of what their early loss had accomplished, for indeed that battle turned the tide of history. May G-d be with them always, and may we never forget their example. G-d, Freedom, Duty and Honor.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Wikipedia’s learning curve isn’t…it’s flatlined.
After their criticism of several years ago and their promise to correct the problems they continue to act in an obama like fashion. No transparency, factual mistakes of relevance and others already mentioned.
Plutarch tells a story of a man who plucks the feathers from a nightingale. Finding that its body sans plumage is pathetically small, he remarks, Vox et praeterea nihil, literally, a voice and nothing more
#2 LOTM
why blog you ask? Why to hear the sound of the other geese honking. For cheer and uplifting of spirits. To hear another sane voice and take heart at not being alone.
Geese honking… This was the only memorable thing I brought away from a required reading assigned here at my job by a zealous and extremely misguided manager. Why do the geese honk as they fly? To encourage thier companions and to recieve encouragement back. A shared burden is a lighter one.
The book was “Gung Ho”, one of those required reads for upwards bound sychophants, helpfully identified by the ever popular red, white and blue patterend dust jacket. Sadly, it had little to do with patriotism or the USMC and even less with the movie starring Randolf Scott. It lost me at the point where the author’s mentor stated to her that the reason “soldiers fight and die is for medals”. Some can’t even be led from the wilderness.
Glad the history here got reconstituted, if even on the fact-flux continuum that is Wiki.
Someone did the right thing after a wrong, power seemingly coming from nowhere to meet a power from somewhere. Can’t always know which way the strong paw will go or whose it is, but I like to say, Keep giving it a good and vital try, Bear.
Best.
And is likely an institutions through which Modern Progressives are marching. Perhaps we should stage a counter-march? Pick a topic or two on which you are competent and edit wikipedia. Set a goal for yourself commensurate with your time – an edit a day, two a week, whatever fits. Don’t be disruptive or intentionally provocative, just be a good editor and see if you can’t rise in the ranks and put a lid on some of the intolerance and foolishness.
Might be a waste of time, but the alternative is creating a parallel encyclopedia, and if it comes to that, the experience participlating in wikipedia would probalby be rather valuable.
If politics is show business for ugly people then Wiki editorship is for people who can’t write.
“Vox et praeterea nihil”
In the grand scope of things, aren’t we all? Dust we are, and to dust we will return – our one great hope is that our Voice, or at least some echo of it, will live on.
The notability warning has been removed!
Aristide,
You’re right. It has been removed. Strange.
*
Aristide,
And the admin who removed the notability warning actually has a name: Jeffrey Robertson, from Ottawa, Canada.
*
#34 JMH,
It wouldn’t work- the editors who obsessively edit each page would have your edits reverted and you warned to not “vandalize” within the day. If you revert their edits, they will alert the admins to a “revert war” and then you get to have dispute resolution.
You’re up against people with way too much free time and a frighteningly detailed understanding of the Wikipedia rules that govern the site.
36. wws:
In re: “Vox et praeterea nihil”
I’ll settle for the Elysian Fields or the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Wikipedia runs hard left, anyone knowing the character of the people who create these things, should not be surprised.
Supplication towards women always produces this sort of ideology, the desire to please the hard left biases women as a group exhibit. Instead of the far more profitable action of exciting and stimulating said women through domination.
A man can be Jessie James, and still excite and attract women like Sandra Bullock. A hard lesson that should be learned by the omega males of Wikipedia.
I have no doubt that James, pictured in the tabloids in full tattooed regalia, wearing a Nazi hat and giving the Hitler salute, would excite and produce desire in the hardest left hot young actress or whatever.
Not because of the Nazi stuff, but because he’s the guy who dominates and excites. Rather than supplicates. A lot of this hard left Wiki-Digg-Reddit stuff is by guys who are less than beta and think that being nice and agreeing with women’s beliefs is productive and useful.
As bad as Wikipedia may seem to be, I have noticed that its information is generally as good as supposedly reputable sources – and is often better.
There’s no nice way to say this, but historical sources from “reputable authors”, “reputable publishers”, and “reputable universities” can sometimes be a pack of lies with a stamp of prestige on it. Unless one actually goes through the original sources line by line, one is relying upon somebody else for a condensed commentary. Remember, even an ancient document held by the Library of Congress can be a fraud.
While it is a form of sloppiness to rely upon Wikipedia for one’s information, it is no more inherently sloppy than most historical or intelligence work ever is. Unless you look at the original source material, you don’t really know the story. And even then, it is easy to misinterpret primary material if you don’t know the historical context.
This is precisely why the manipulation of climate data at the University of East Anglia is such a scandal. If the primary notes and documents are tampered with, the credibility of the science based upon it is shattered. When Albert Gore Jr. seeks to minimize the scandal, he not only makes the situation worse but he also undermines his own credibility. (All I really know is what the borehole data showed through 1998, so my knowledge is out of date.)
Context. If you read a normal letter saying, “Give so-and-so my regards,” that sounds nice. If it is a letter from an inmate at a maximum-security prison, this may be an execution order. If you heard a man say, “We can’t go around killing a man such as Ahmadinejad because that would be wrong,” the meaning may be different depending on whether he were a philosophy professor talking in an ethics class or a spymaster giving an assassin a non-directive.
Wikipedia is imperfect. It is politically manipulated. It is sometimes wrong. That’s par for the course in the real world. Let’s not assume that Wikipedia is worse than other sources merely because it didn’t come out of a commercial or academic press and cost over $20 at a bookstore.
42 Whiskey:
I can see trends that suggest women “don’t value liberty” as much as men, and anecdotal evidence that suggests that (and not just in recent history –”Prohibition and the Women’s Vote,” anyone?). However, how does one explain the Tea Party movement having more than half its membership female?
@Jeffrey — New York: Regarding my deletion record: it’s standard practice to delete redirects to a page upon deleting a page itself. Otherwise, you end up with redirects that go nowhere. It’s that simple.
Let me reiterate: my only involvement in the deletion was to carry out the deletion itself. Scythian77 nominated the page, which had been sitting around, completely unreferenced, for *nearly three years*, seven full days passed without a single soul suggesting that it ought not to be deleted, and so I deleted it after that time was up. The “proposed deletion” process used is intended for this sort of uncontroversial deletion.
And again: If anyone had asked before spamming my user talk page and calling me a jackass, Nazi, or censor, I’d have immediately, cheerfully undeleted the page. I was annoyed and of a short temper, so I delayed taking action so as not to do anything out of spite (such as blocking some of the users/addresses who had posted the most egregious personal attacks). I can’t see how this (not doing things out of spite) is a bad reaction.
As it is, Arbitrarily0 beat me to the undeletion; he appears to have done it while I was busy replying to the flood of messages on my talk page, or shortly after, or something.
Some miscellanous points: I am not a nihilist (or against nihilism, for that matter), just Latin for “nothing” forms part of my pseudonym. I’m not particularly leftist as far as I can tell, but granted I’m Canadian; even our Conservative party is left of Obama.
I really don’t have an opinion on this blog as long as the Internet Hate Machine leaves me alone.
Cheers, folks, enjoy your article, and please offer up some decent references so that it won’t get deleted again (this is entirely possible, not that I’ll be involved).
For what it’s worth, I’d be glad to help anyone with Wikipedia who wants it. Just ask me (civilly) on my user talk page.
#44 Don Rodrigo:
However, how does one explain the Tea Party movement having more than half its membership female?
They’re all past the age of status competition. That’s why the movement is devoid of women under forty or so.
Nihiltres,
As another Canadian (one who didn’t comment on your page), the Conservative party is not to the left of Obama. If they appear to the left, it is because the system has been skewed dangerously to the left for far too many years, and repair will take a great deal of effort and slow movement. People have become far too used to a paternal government that pretends to take care of them.
At least Harper is moving in the correct direction, towards liberty and personal responsibility, unlike Obama, who is moving towards unsustainable entitlements.
Lotm: I’ve visited your blog, as I try to check out any sites recommended by BCers. In a world of excess information direction in one’s inquiry is valuable, I mean invaluable!
Habu, you’re right about detecting mendacity or just prejudice, but there is no a priori knowledge (except things like the law of contradiction); discerning truth from falsehood requires a difficult, time consuming, a posteriori task of cross checking and comparison, which is why most leave it to the network news readers who’s faces they have grown accustomed to trusting.
(I still watch network news, but more to see how they frame things I already know about.)
But there is a problem with the blogosphere: a re-minting of the problem of 900 cable channels, or sectarian religion generally. It’s easy to tune in to only those voices that you agree with. You can completely “surround yourself with yourself” YES we can. Like Narcissus and his reflection. (Chas Johnson is in control of HIS blog!)
At the Belmont club however the honesty of the commenters is truly disarming; my jaw might drop sometimes, at what I read, but I never have to wonder “what is this guy trying to lead me to believe?”
This quality derives from the openness, the honesty and omni-voraciousness of our seminar leader Wretchard, who is too humble. It is his excellence that draws the excellent commenters. So thank you W and all you BCers.
FWIW, a play I recently saw, “Looking glass Alice” based on Lewis Carroll, had this line, (the magical secret of group think):
“One cannot just believe impossible things.” “No, one cannot, but two always can!”
44. Don Rodrigo
“However, how does one explain the Tea Party movement having more than half its membership female?”
A fair enough question. Part of the answer is hormonal. As women grow older they begin to develop higher levels of testosterone, where as men lose testosterone.
As a consequence that coquettish little loving girl one married thirty years ago can become a raving fish wife in a heartbeat.
Add a lifetime of housewife economics and they quickly see through the puerile economic fiction of Herr obamas and it pushes their button as hard as any mans.
Nihiltres,
Thanks for stopping by. Well, I guess it turned out NOT to be an “uncontroversial deletion,” right?
And again: If anyone had asked before spamming my user talk page and calling me a jackass, Nazi, or censor, I’d have immediately, cheerfully undeleted the page. I was annoyed and of a short temper, so I delayed taking action so as not to do anything out of spite (such as blocking some of the users/addresses who had posted the most egregious personal attacks). I can’t see how this (not doing things out of spite) is a bad reaction.
I found much to laugh about in this paragraph. My own request was straight-forward. I simply asked you to undelete the deletion because I knew how important Belmont Club has been as a place for wide-ranging discussions — not to mentions its millions of visits. Hey, you weren’t aware of it. Live and learn.
I had to laugh, though, of you getting angry at being called a jackass. Do you spend any time in the blogosphere? Jesus, I can’t imagine anyone these days being offended by being called a jackass. “Egregious personal attacks”?! Wow, heavy. Listen, your original reasoning for deleting Belmont Club was knee-jerk and unfounded. C’mon, you were indeed a jackass. Deal with it. And the idea that you tarried in your response because you were so angry that you might have done something rash is risible in the extreme.
*
I think it laudable to enter what can only be perceived as hostile territory and defend your position as face-to-face as it gets in blogworld.
Good luck to you.
“Cheers, folks, enjoy your article, and please offer up some decent references so that it won’t get deleted again.”
Honest question – what qualifies as a “decent reference”, and how is one “offered up” in a way that will be recognized?
Nihiltres,
I really don’t have an opinion on this blog as long as the Internet Hate Machine leaves me alone.
Obviously you had an opinion when you deleted Belmont Club in the first place. Don’t try to hide behind your Mom’s apron now, okay?
Internet Hate Machine? Very dramatic.
Cheers, folks, enjoy your article, and please offer up some decent references so that it won’t get deleted again (this is entirely possible, not that I’ll be involved).
Okay, let me get this straight. Richard Fernandez is supposed to kneel down and supply “decent references” — this is guy whose blog has gotten MILLIONS of hits — to a pseudonymous weenie like you and your fellow admins?!!
WTF.
And you won’t be involved if Belmont Club is deleted again?
Yeah, riiiiiiiight.
*
@Nihiltres,
Thanks for the update and explanation. Wikipedia appears to be a fascinating world with its own rules and laws. Kind of reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s L-space (a quantum library). After my brief intrusion into it in defense of Belmont club, it seems that one can become easily lost in the intricate sub-systems. I for one, plan to take advantage of your kind offer of help, albeit keeping in mind that you are a student and spare time is probably a scarce commodity for you; I will try to limit my burgeoning curiosity.
Programmer,
Constant reader, infrequent commenter.
48. flying squirrel
A sticky wicket.
It seems that ultimately a priori justification must rest on the justification that rational intuition, or insight, provides. In deductive arguments they provide the justification for the belief that the conclusion follows from the premises, and sometimes for the premises themselves. In inductive arguments, or arguments involving inference to the best explanation, rational intuitions must ultimately provide justification for those ampliative principles themselves. When it comes to the philosophical analysis of concepts, intuitions provide the data of which the proffered analysis, if justified, is the best explanation.
Some maintain that to be justified in accepting the proffered analysis it, too, should be intuitively obvious, even if not immediately. Though empiricists will disagree, others will embrace BonJour’s claim that philosophy must be a priori “if it has any intellectual standing at all” (BonJour, 1998, 106).
“If this site had only five commenters, but they were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvald, etc it would still be something.”
iWinux? I’ll pass.
flying squirrel:
Cogito ergo sum, “I think therfore I am” the famous dictum of Rene Descates and one of the smartest men to ever live; How would you classify his statement? a priori or a posteriori ?
oops dinner bell!
later and thanks for the enjoyable colloquy.
H
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
…the Internet Hate Machine…
Which one?
I use wikipedia to learn the differences between the Spartans and the Athenians or the GAEC (Generally Accepted Economic Causes(tm)) of the 30 Years War and maybe who was on whose side. also useful for “I know that name from somewhere?” questions.
WRT the BC, it also is useful when the RSG’s drop a name I never heard of. Saves a WhoDat???
This whole incident has been quite the education about Wiki. But the main thing to keep in mind is that Wrechard’s essays and subsequent discussion are the reasons that we all read and interact at the Belmont Club. Wiki can talk about BC, but BC has no reason to be beholden to Wiki, except to get in their faces when Wiki starts bullying tactics.
49. Habu:
A fair enough question. Part of the answer is hormonal. As women grow older they begin to develop higher levels of testosterone, where as men lose testosterone.
Perhaps. But isn’t it more likely that it’s not just biological, but also sociological? As I stated above somewhere, there is ample evidence that women are somewhat more likely to seek security and safeties than men are, but it’s a tendency, not a clear gender demarcation. Some years before women got the vote on a national level, it was women of the West who first got to vote in local and statewide elections (and almost never any mention of “prohibition.” Carrie Nation got a very ugly reception in the West). The West of 100 years ago was arguably more masculine than the East (and still is), but the women had proven their mettle outside of their traditional roles, and thus won the grudging respect of the western menfolk.
Also, OTOH, one of the dynamics driving so many women to the Tea Parties may be a pragmatic variant on their desire for “safety and security,” but supplied by themselves and their menfolk as free and productive citizens. They don’t, and rightly so, trust the government to make life “better” and “safer” for themselves and their children. They believe that if they are allowed to keep more of their own money, allowed to own guns, can make solid investments in a thriving economy to help insure their family’s future, that to them is “safety” and “security” they can put their hands around, because it is a self-imposed policy they designed for themselves as individuals and families.
Habu, you are so full of shit, I can’t reply. You were a Christian once. Then a militant. Stop it now, you will confuse the people.
I applaud the self-organization and what it has achieved. A good result, in almost no time flat. With a lot of excellent input. Even the off-topic stuff is never, really, O/T. The collective wisdom, the individual insights and anecdotes, the sparring, the Walt poetry that summarizes and transcends the dialogue (“multilogue”?)…all good. All make blindingly obvious why Nihiltres was way wrong to delete. I give him props for showing up here and trying to ‘splain how he’s really a victim too. It doesn’t quite work but he’s young. Let’s not beat him up.
If he ever does it again, though, I will withdraw that suggestion.
Also a fascinating look behind the veil of Wikipedia. Any priesthood tends toward corruption. Not sure how well the Wikis are handling that these days. I don’t rely on it for more than a first look at basic (apolitical) topics.
Cogito, ergo sam
I am
I am Sam
That Sam-I-am
I do not like
green jpegs and spam
Wretchard #6:
“In a growing online world “reputation” — or ‘notability’ — will eventually be online reputation or online notability.”
I first came to The Belmont Club because visiting National Review Online’s blog The Corner was a daily habit of mine. And there Jonah Goldberg provided a link to one of Wretchard’s early posts, adding that the CIA or DoD or the State Dept or someone ought to hire the guy, considering the quality of analysis he was providing.
A consequence of that visit of that I now only very rarely go to the Corner, even though I subscribe to the digital version of National Review. The reason is not just that my inputs on occasion receive a considerable amount of attention but that while The Corner has professional writers occasionally delivering short juicy tidbits The Belmont Club usually has professionals from many fields providing big meaty sandwiches.
But I think that The Internet is pretty much a zero sum game. More time at Belmont means less time somewhere else, with my experience with the Corner as an example. So “Notability” means “Successful Gunslinger.” And thus there will always be some punk trying to knock you off. Perhaps the best indicator of Notability is not hits but hit jobs.
Finally, if y’all are near an Aldi supermarket, take a look there for “Belmont” brand snacks. I am munching on one of the brand’s nice cream wafer rolls right now. I should send Wretchard some cans of the treat.
It might end up something like this—Hume,Descartes, Kant, Schopenhaurer, Nietzche, but Habu knows nothing about this. He just wants to talk about his exploits, which none of us believe to be true. The true insight is in Schopenhaer, where he says, they are all one behind the scenes. The secret of the two brothers. That’s mythm and, reality.
Finally, if y’all are near an Aldi supermarket, take a look there for “Belmont” brand snacks. I am munching on one of the brand’s nice cream wafer rolls right now. I should send Wretchard some cans of the treat.
I think Aldi supermarket brandnames are fascinating subjects for research. Because they “sound famous” without actually being famous brands. There was a guy I met who claimed that finding these names was an art form. So that instead of doing business as Dilwort and Costello they would call themselves “James and Monroe”, which sounds a hell of a lot more upscale than the former.
Agoraphobic – “iWinux? I’ll pass.”
Funny stuff!
This too –
Wikid – “’I hate’ green jpegs and spam”
67. bob
Eat your heart out. I’ve been hearing this “We don’t believe you” crap for years.
Sorry I can’t make you eat your words … like their weren’t thousands of CIA officers in the 1970′s and 1980′s …
what exactly don’t you believe? That I wasn’t a US Marine and later a CIA officer?
And what were you, a grocery clerk or accountant?
And there are a few who do believe me … but if it comforts you to disbelieve then go for it.
67. bob
what’s mythm ?
myth with a beat?
Habu: thanks for the response. I’m a Wittgensteinian; the rules of logic derive from the actual grammatical rules governing language, and are only pictured as being housed in the mind, “Intuition is a needless shuffle.”
Basically a priori has to do with making sense; posteriori with gauging truth; judging verifiability. Philosophy as a priori seeks clarity; science holds the clear concepts up against the world to take measure of its irregularities.
The ruler is a foot long is a priori (by definition) the sub is a foot long is a verifiable assertion. Mr. Johnson is a foot long is a falsifiable assertion.
Descartes; in this instance did he say anything at all? First, whom was he talking to? Did he succeed in making himself clear? Was he correctly understood? Did he persuade himself, or is he still thinking it over? It’s as if he bumped into himself in the dark and took himself for a time, for someone else, asking his pardon. It’s something of a private (language) joke that you can significantly tell yourself something. “Can my right hand give my left hand money?”
In short he was not at all sufficient clear and maybe even a little dishonest with himself; ” I am therefore I think” is at least as true. Perhaps to a philosopher thinking seems more obvious than being. But his statement fails as logic, the “therefore” is gratuitous. “I think! I am! Is all he really means. But (knowing his intention in the meditations) he wishes to assert his own thinking/being as something “therefore” certain, as a step toward “proving” the external world. In short the cogito is neither a priori or posteriori; it is not an assertion but an expression of a feeling: the feeling of shock at awareness of his own being.
(thanks for the fun)
As a follower since your beginning, and a rare commenter, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Perhaps there’s hope for all of us after all. Qui tacet consentire.
Well, how do we really know the demographic composition of the Tea Parties? Sounds like a bit of agiprop to me. I imagine that we should be wise not to believe a thing that we hear out of the establishment concerning the Tea Party folks.
Bob, you comments on Habu are uncalled for and unsupportable–they are also practically unintelligible so far as philosophy is concerned.
@Jeffrey — New York:
“Obviously you had an opinion when you deleted Belmont Club in the first place. Don’t try to hide behind your Mom’s apron now, okay?”
My opinion was that an article which had remained unreferenced for three years short a month, which had been tagged for deletion for a week without a single peep of a response, was an uncontroversial deletion. And it was, at that point. It was only around a week after that that the owner of the blog left a post calling the deletion Orwellian, causing me to receive a flurry of complaints.
“I can’t imagine anyone these days being offended by being called a jackass. “Egregious personal attacks”?! Wow, heavy. Listen, your original reasoning for deleting Belmont Club was knee-jerk and unfounded. C’mon, you were indeed a jackass. Deal with it.”
My deletion was demonstrably *not* “knee-jerk” or “unfounded”. It was a reasonable decision based on all the information readily available. In the long run, was it right? No, it was overturned because new information came up. But that doesn’t make the original action stupid, unfounded, or the actions of a jackass. And I say “egregious personal attack” because it was on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s standards of courtesy are higher than the blogosphere’s. In the case of established users, that kind of conduct might even justify a (temporary) block from editing were the behaviour continued.
Deletion on Wikipedia is not Orwellian. It may be confusing, unreasonably confusing, even, but poor usability on the part of deletion processes doesn’t make it Orwellian by any means. There’s my name, the rationale given for the deletion as given by the nominator, a link that describes the deletion as “Expired PROD” with a link describing the proposed deletion process. The simple step of asking nicely (“Why did you delete this? Would you please restore it?”) would have sufficed. I’ve deleted thousands upon thousands of pages, and on a relatively small percentage, I get complaints. And each time, I’ve explained the deletion, and, if reasonable*, offered to restore the article, restore it as a userpage for working on and reposting, or emailing the content of the page. (*It’s not reasonable to ask for content deleted as copyright violation, libel, and a few other cases.) In the great majority of those cases, I don’t get called names for the deletion, and everyone’s happy.
“Internet Hate Machine? Very dramatic.”
I used this ironically, and if I remember correctly, it’s also a meme somewhere or other.
“Okay, let me get this straight. Richard Fernandez is supposed to kneel down and supply “decent references” — this is guy whose blog has gotten MILLIONS of hits — to a pseudonymous weenie like you and your fellow admins?!!”
First of all, it doesn’t have to be Richard Fernandez. Anyone can do it. Ideally, you the fans of this blog can do it. Second, yes. In the context of Wikipedia, articles should be verifiable. Articles are made verifiable by citing sources, and those sources should generally be independent of the subject. Finally, hits don’t really matter. Should Wikipedia, say, create an article on every YouTube video that gets over a million views? What if an author posts a hundred videos that get 10,000 views each? The debate over “inclusionism” and “deletionism” has been over for quite a while now, in favour of a simple idea of verifiability. Where the inherent importance of a topic is unclear, people say “show me some sources”. Verifiability is also important so that people can’t make up random nonsense. What if someone wanted to post “Belmont Club is a blog authored by Cat(herine) Wretchard, about her cat named ‘Richard Fernandez’”? This is an extreme example, but it’s a start. What if someone said tomorrow “Richard’s avatar was changed to an image of a cat for April 1, 2003″? That sort of fact would be unverifiable (and presumably is false) and would be a problem. That’s why references are, well, demanded.
For @wws: “[…] what qualifies as a “decent reference”, and how is one “offered up” in a way that will be recognized?”
What’s a decent reference should be adequately explained at http://enwp.org/WP:RS , and what’s a good way to add it is described at http://enwp.org/WP:FOOT . I can go into further detail if you want.
“And you won’t be involved if Belmont Club is deleted again?
Yeah, riiiiiiiight.”
I don’t care for drama. I don’t care whether or not the article exists in Wikipedia—it might be nice, so long as it’s of decent quality—but I have sufficiently little motivation to delete it at this point that I would not initiate a deletion process. Besides, at this point you’d (plural) just accuse me of more laughable things like being a power-mad leftist censor.
@programmer: You have *no idea* how much of its own world it is.
For a fairly decent, and amusing, 5-minute introduction, I suggest this YouTube video: http://youtu.be/UEkF5o6KPNI
29. wws: wrote
Jimbo, I was just talking to Gary and he’s real hurt to have been included on your list there!!!
My sincere apologies to Gary. Tell him it wasn’t personal.
a poet’s that’s withem
Welcome to the conversation, nihiltres!
Wretchard #68:
Aldi features a brand of canned goods called “Rangemaster” – which also happens to be the name of the long range tip-tank equipped version of the Ryan Navion. I don’t think there is a connection.
A visit to Aldi is a little like a trip to an alternate universe. The supermarket is like a “normal” one but not quite. It’s a smaller store, but not tiny, the products are same kinds you are used to seeing in other stores but are brands you never heard of, with names that are strangely evocative of something or another in an earlier time. And some prices are much lower, like 99 cents each for a frozen chicken cordon blu just like the ones that that are two for $4.59 at Publix.
The most poorly chosen name I can recall seeing for any product were the car radios made by “Sparkomatic.” I think the company made auto ignition systems at one time, so the name is understandable, but it is not a label that inspires confidence in a radio receiver. However, I have a number of radio receivers made in the 1940′s by an outfit called Belmont Radio; they were used in USAAF bombers.
Jamie Irons: Thanks. The reason we write, all of us, as Lifeofthemind has so eloquently pointed out, is the hope that someone, somewhere, someday, might read and appreciate them.
Nihiltres has just found out that ‘the web is forever’…
Anyone can make a mistake, but a fool is forever.
My, the things us wimmin folks can find out about ourselves from reading this blog. Apparently, we’re sentimental squishes with a natural affinity for soft totalitarianism until the boobs fall and the testosterone levels rise and then we become raging fish wives – who go to tea parties.
Silly female me, here I thought,I, and many other women, attended tea parties last summer because “they believe that if they are allowed to keep more of their own money, allowed to own guns, can make solid investments in a thriving economy to help insure their family’s future, that to them is “safety” and “security” they can put their hands around, because it is a self-imposed policy they designed for themselves as individuals and families.” In other words, I thought I went for much the same reasons as the male tea partiers. I was under the impression that my brain and reasoning powers led me to become a conservative, but alas, it’s my uterus which is leading me.
Do continue, gentlemen, to enlighten me with your pearls of wisdom about the fairer sex. It brings back fond memories of Cliff Claven and Norm waxing philosophical on “Cheers.”
Nihiltres: Thanks for stopping by. We’re about nothing here if not good conversation and exchange of views. This whole episode has been something of a learning experience about Wikipedia.
Some of us not only believe Habu about his past, but actually look forward to his postings on current affairs.
Much respect and thanks for your service Habu, from a reasonably old Navy Vet.
Nihiltres,
My deletion was demonstrably *not* “knee-jerk” or “unfounded”. It was a reasonable decision based on all the information readily available.
A reasonable decision based on all information then available? That’s a hoot. I mean, did you do ANY research on who Richard Fernandez was or anything about his weblog? To me, it sounds like you’re trying to CYA.
In the long run, was it right? No, it was overturned because new information came up. But that doesn’t make the original action stupid, unfounded, or the actions of a jackass.
You wrote that it sounded like an advertisement. I imagine that’s all the “research” you did. You read the entry and hit delete, along with anything other tags connected with Richard Fernandez. In my book those are the actions of a jackass. Hey, for me, “jackass” is a technical term, so don’t be offended.
*
programmer #54: That was downright “Sharpie”
of you. Your facade of a Gay Deceiver
cannot hide the Galahad that shines through.
Nihiltres,
But thanks for returning and telling us your side of the matter. Like others have said, what’s interesting here is getting a glimpse of the background politics of the Wiki users. As I’ve said above, I use Wikipedia pretty often to get fast, basic information.
Here’s a question. Why do so many Wiki users employ pseudonyms?
Okay, I’ll take a look at your links on citation practices and what Wikipedia deems a “decent reference.”
*
Richard,
By the way, I always thought that “Belmont Club” was a damn clever name for a blog. It suggested to me a literary circle of some kind, one that I had perhaps forgotten reading about in F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, for example.
*
Nihiltres -
I didn’t keep exact count but you may be fixating on the negative. Your initial response was on the point and neutral by my book. I think most people would agree. We here have mixed opinions of, kind of a love hate relationship, with Wikipedia. I have followed Belmont for as long as many here and we are, in general, drawn to Wikipedia for various reasons. Most of us here, or perhaps, speaking for myself; I know little about the process that creates such vast quantities, and, by and large, such good quality data and information on anything that one might ponder.
One too must consider whether it is possible to have a rational and factual balance with an online entity. Is the information pure or must it be necessarily co-opted by the most enthusiastic of interpreters? Can a dispassionate truth rise up out of the blog’o’sphere or is it destined to be gerrymandered like any other so-called intellectual domains? I appreciate your good humor.
In defense of Habu, who clearly needs no ones help to defend himself, I don’t know him from Adam’s off ox, but he sure sounds like most of the former spooks of the Viet Nam and after era that I have encountered. And, no, I wouldn’t tell you any of their names either. Never a spook myself, but I’ve crossed paths a number of very interesting people from that background. Thank you Habu for your posts.
He’s either a dead ringer or a little off pitch.
I for one think Nihiltres is showing the right stuff by surfacing here and explaining the arcane world of Wiki. Good show.
Though one thing I’d like to explain to Nihiltres is the flurry of invective he received from the collected Belmonters. Accepting his description of himself as a sort of middle-of-the-roader, what he probably doesn’t get is the extreme sense of siege that those on the right have felt in the already interminable Obama years. And it ain’t just paranoia: it’s quite real. The Left is out for us, plain and simple. However innocent the deletion of the Belmont wiki entry — and I’m convinced now that it was basically following procedure and little else — it was completely natural for the Belmont community to suspect malice in the action.
I mean heck, we’ve been expecting this. Far worse, a lot of us wouldn’t be surprised if the blog itself were shut down, much less the Wiki entry deleted.
As the saying goes, to know all is to forgive all. So Nihiltres, we may have been rude to you, but the deletion felt like a blow on a wound and you got caught in the storm that ensued.
And sorry about that jackass thing.
Nihiltres writes: “Deletion on Wikipedia is not Orwellian. It may be confusing, unreasonably confusing, even, but poor usability on the part of deletion processes doesn’t make it Orwellian by any means.”
Actually, it is perfectly Orwellian; perhaps the very definition of it. Although the details, rules, and procedures weren’t detailed the overall process is no different than how Winston Smith worked; what Orwell laid out. Someone anonymous makes a decision about a person’s or fact’s existence, the remainder of the bureaucracy carries it out according to the rules.
‘Nihiltres’ is just another Winston; though in this case a comfortably loyal, unquestioning, and obedient Winston.
Donna V
the folk over there have much of the inductive reasonnement on the womin, from their own perspective of reading facts, they assert it as a generality ! But facts are appearances, and certainly not a valuable basis for a corollary, again the cartesian methodic doubt should prevail, but I guess becuz womin had no soul (until not too late), it’s no use then to associate them with a metaphysical doubt, but only with emotional polemics
uh petit ecureuil, the recognition of Descartes as being a thinking person, only applied for metaphisical “truths” not for questionning the every day life, and in the perspective of the ambiant philosophy of scepticism, which is paralysing, Descartes had to doubt with a “scientifical” method to find a way to quit the system.
there isn’t an aprioriri nor a posteriori becuz it’s a beginning of something !
I see another Old Salt posting on BC (as OldSalt), so I will morph to Black Shoe. I’m still an old salt – and a Black Shoe (Navy line officer, a “ship driver” – now retired).
- – - –
#2 LifeOfTheMind “Walt was right that I blog and no one reads it. So much of what we do is the electronic equivalent of shouting into a barrel. On the BC I spend an hour writing a comment and the thread closes. With no feedback I wonder if it is even read.
- – - –
Ah, but I read your comment, and believe it one of the very best – indeed, a classic. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
I guess I’m just a curmudgeon, but I thought it kinda cool to be banned from Wiki. Like, “Banned in Boston” in a different day and age.
“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”–Groucho the Great
Hey, it’s only Wiki. Good for laffs and all, but…
I’ve fallen in love with Donna V at #83. A well spoken woman, wimmen, whatever.
bob,
Six days a week you can start a fight with Habu. Heck on four of those days you might have to get in line, and on at least two occasions the line formed behind me. Still even if he was the second coming of Baron Munchausen there is no reason to use an ad hominem to attack his scholarly references. Many things can fly under the radar on the Internet but the one thing that this crowd does very efficiently is detect pretension. Habu‘s scholarly or literary comments reflect his education and reading. Unless you can produce an Annie Hall moment of revelation to prove that he is talking through his hat you are out of line to disparage his apparently lucid thoughts on philosophy.
It is particularly off key to gratuitously pick a fight while we are all rallying around to defend the Club. On the ship two guys might be circing each other with evil intent because one always seems to draw the duty the first night in Subic or OZ but if the GQ sounds they work together like family. Better in fact considering some families. Habu we better get back to debating the fine distinctions between Democratic Republics and Republican Democracies or people will tell us to get a room.
Regarding another professional thinker of deep thoughts someplace in the house is or was a paperback with the title “The Essential Schopenhauer.” When I was 12 I asked my brother if I should read it and he assured me “There is nothing essential about Schopenhauer.”
Nihiltres gets one share, redeemable at Milo Minderbinder’s, for showing up. There is no excuse for failing to post a notice on the entry in question stating in advance that it was scheduled for deletion and there is no reason not to have an automatic notice emailed to parties who claim ownership or an editorial role for a particular entry. Pleading that the site is to technically antiquated or to rise to such a basic level of what passes for customer service these days is not an excuse. Even worse is to say that they always do it that way. When I am a Supervisor one of the first things I say is that no one is to ever challenge a question or instruction by saying “But we always do it that (other) way.” It sounds suspiciously like a government clerk pleading that it is not his fault that the IRS lost your file or that because Congress refused to appropriate an additional $10 million they can’t put any light-bulbs in the Washington Monument so it will have to close.
To me the most chilling scene in Claude Lanzmann’a Shoah was when the travel agent explained that he did not kill anyone. He just arranged the group fare travel for Jews going to Auschwitz on the Reichsbahn. Somebody else selected them. Responsibility is not divided but multiplied. If I remember the full interview Stier 40 years later complained at one point that the SS still owed for one “excursion.”
The “new information came up” defense for a bureaucratic blunder does not make me change my position on Capital Punishment but it does make me want to be sure that Nihiltres is not on my jury. Devotion to procedure devoid of moral content is reflected in Canada by the Human Rights tribunals or in American English the PC Kangaroo Courts.
To be blogged under the title “Scholars.”
One thing that occurred to me was the hypothetical case if everything was reversed: a lefty blog, say the Huffington Post, was deleted from Wikipedia. What would the reaction be? Would the lefties be merely mollified by the restoration of the entry? Would Nihiltres’ explanation have sufficed for them?
No, they would have slammed him and slammed him harder than the regulars here. The left has never been civil to those who opposed it and set up obstacles to their broad ideology.
The question for us is, do we have to do the same? Can we?
Dear Life of the Mind–I have seen Habu, for propaganda purposes, claim he is a CHRISTIAN, and in the next breath claim the philosphy of the survival of fit. Christ, you can’t have it both ways. I like my philosophy straight, not a mixed drink.
In particular I think part of the bruhaha arises from a fundamental difference in the wikipedian and blogovarian norms. A blog that deletes (or even alters) previous entries is widely seen as manipulative and untrustworthy. Since the “log” part of “blog” refers to a history, akin to a ships log (hello Old Shoe, I mean Black Salt, er,ah…) making material changes in previous entries is tampering with the record.
Wikipedia is far more open to retroactive changes, trying to present the “current accepted version” of a topic rather than a conversation about it. This by itself looks suspicious to an average bloggie, but it’s even more nefarious in the eyes of the typical Belmont Clubber, since the ideas of knowledge, truth, and trustworty sources of information are frequent subjects of commentary here.
And there’s good reason that Wretchard frequents these topics – they’re pretty important to understanding how we got to where we are today in our world. I think in it’s current form, Wikipeida is on the road to failure because of the inherent conflict in establishing the one-true-version of events in a very Roshomon world. Various subjects on wikipedia have already been hijacked by fanatics, and if the subjects I am familiar with are censored and slanted, why should I trust it for the subjects I’m not familiar with?
So, Nihiltres, kudos from me as well for showing up here and helping explain what happened, but I hope the information exchange can be a two way street. Can you take anything from this thread back to your work on wikipedia?
Howdy. Long-time lurker here and (under another handle) long-time Wikipedia editor and (not very active) administrator. I would have weighed in earlier, but I had to work, and this whole affair played out in Internet time. There seem to be a fair number of questions and misapprehensions revolving around here, and I think I can clear up some of them.
First, why do people spend lots of energy deleting things on Wikipedia, anyway? To find out, take a look at . This is the special list of the most recently created pages on Wikipedia at a given time; or, as it’s known to the regulars, the “Firehose of Crap”. As you’ve probably seen during the previous comment threads, one of the principal ideological divisions in Wikipedia is between the “inclusionists” and the “deletionists”. That link is more or less the strongest argument for the deletionist case. A lot of the things people put into Wikipedia are self-promotional, meaningless, or Just Plain Wrong. This is the fundamental problem with extreme inclusionism: without pruning, the things that “just aren’t so” overwhelm the facts and render it impossible to have any confidence in the work as a whole.
At present, the question of “Shall we delete it from Wikipedia?” hinges on a somewhat mysterious quality called “notability,” the sense of the word on Wikipedia being somewhat different from that in ordinary English. In essence, per , any Wikipedia article should demonstrate that its subject has been adequately described by non-self-referential sources. There are more detailed permutations of this general guideline: would cover this specific case. Having looked at the version of the article before it was tagged for deletion, there were no references to any external coverage (i.e., something not created by Wretchard), and the only thing that really distinguished it from any other political weblog was the 8 million hits figure. It mimics the signature, so to speak, of a self-promotional entry. Add to that the fact that no one had apparently tried to update or improve the article in the past 2 years, and it’s not surprising that Nihiltres didn’t see anything exceptional about deleting it.
Apropos of which, let’s move on to the deletion process in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has 3 main mechanisms for deletion: speedy, PROD, and AFD. Editors cannot delete articles; they have to add a tag to the article submitting it to one of these processes, and depending on the outcome of a process, an administrator will delete or not delete. Speedy deletion is reserved for things like blank pages, “attack pages” (article exists solely to libel), and “patent nonsense” (gibberish); administrators will generally decline to speedy-delete anything that has even a prayer of being a valid article. AFD (Articles For Deletion) is a sort of public forum on the notability or worthiness of an article; articles entered in the process are listed on a central forum for public comment for a period of one week. At the end of the week, an uninvolved administrator looks over the comments, decides which side has made the best case, and either keeps or deletes the article. Originally, only these two mechanisms existed, but some years ago, AFD was running into scaling problems. That was when PROD (PROposed Deletion) was invented. Basically, anyone can add a tag to the top of an article to propose it for deletion. If no one has removed that tag after 7 days, an administrator checks the article to confirm that no one has objected to the deletion on the talk page and that the tag has been there continuously. However, if someone objects to the proposal, they can remove the tag *and the article can never be proposed for deletion again*. If the original proposer still thinks it should be deleted, it *must* go to AFD rather than via PROD, so that the merits can be debated. It’s sort of a free-market mechanism for deletion control; only the articles that no one cares enough to argue about get deleted without debate.
As far as I can tell from , Nihiltres did nothing wrong by the rules as they stand. The PROD tag was there 7 days, the reason given wasn’t /prima facie/ unbelievable, and no one objected on the talk page or tried to remove the PROD tag. I don’t see any reason to believe this was connected to his politics; he was just going around taking out the trash, as it were. Deleting “Richard Fernandez”, “Wretchard”, etc. is part and parcel of the same; as the speedy deletion reason (G8) says, they were redirects to a deleted page. Once the main Belmont Club article was deleted, they were pointers to nowhere, and cleaning them up is just routine housekeeping, what an administrator would do after deleting any page. It’s not a sign of some secret vendetta.
Scythian77 is not so easily cleared. Taking a look back over his contributions history, it looks like he has a history of editing in Middle Eastern topics, sometimes politically charged; from username and content of edits, I assume he’s an Iranian-American, with political view probably antipathetic to most of the readership here. My guess is that he noticed that Belmont Club’s article was neglected and thought he could draw a little blood by proposing it for deletion.
He’s probably not finished, though; though I think this site is of importance in the political blogosphere, I’d have trouble proving it by the criteria in the links I added above. Any data our host could supply in terms of interviews with or coverage by other forms of media would be helpful in demonstrating this. If that proves impossible to do, I’d suggest for plan B adding the information as a section in the “Pajamas Media” article. The notability of that topic has already been established; Wretchard is probably one of the more influential PJM bloggers, so adding the information about Belmont Club there probably wouldn’t constitute “undue weight”. (This is another Wikipedia legalism; essentially, this policy says that articles should provide a balanced picture of their subject, so that a 5-paragraph article about a politician can’t have 1 paragraph about his legislative achievements and 4 paragraphs about the time he picked his nose on TV.)
More to follow later on the politics of Wikipedia (short version: like the nations so often discussed here, Wikipedia has an internal politics to which the left/right issues we’re used to are mostly a sideshow), but I hope this provides some enlightenment from someone who’s been inside the machine.
Quick followup to Lifeofthemind:
Such notices do exist, within the Wikipedia framework. Every registered editor has what’s called a “watchlist”; on a single page, they can see aggregated every change made in the past few days to each article that they watch. By default, articles you create are added to your own watchlist (although you can remove them if you choose). So in most cases, the creator will be notified of a proposed deletion; but if the creator retired from Wikipedia, or removed the article from their watchlist, or never intended to be active on Wikipedia, that notice may disappear into the ether. And if no one else is watching…
The Wobbly Guy: you might be surprised. The internal politics of Wikipedia tend to win out over external politics when present; I would say the urge to delete self-promotion (or rather, perceived self-promotion) would exert a far stronger force on an AFD discussion than left/right alignment.
O.T. I’m off to read the new Library of America edition of M. Twain’s Tramps Abroad, especially “Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn” Can’t wait to read it to my grandson – it says a lot about the human race.
Ned
Brainstorm, has wretchard been interviewed in Technorati or anyplace else that cam be referenced? Can we use the allegations at another place that the Club was a cabal of Houston Conservative, something about L3? If we edit in those external references to the site, even reporting and debunking fairly the criticism, then presto does it meets the wiki criteria?
I can see how this becomes an incitement to a nightmare of sock-puppetry, which I am not advocating, in which people create false sites to report on other sites so that they drive up the ‘reference’ count that wiki, and I suppose Google, use to evaluate worth. That worth or ‘notability’ will in fact be worth real money to many people.
Black Shoe,
I am a Black Shoe myself. The important question is, are you a Shellback or a Polliwog?
Donna V,
but alas, it’s my uterus which is leading me
Consider the way you can fairly describe how many men are lead around.
ConservativeMutant,
To cut to the chase a seven day window for an entry that is Prod but not grounds for Speedy deletion is an invitation to abuse. People can go away for a week and return to face real damage. The volume of trash is acknowledged but the technical tools are available to provide better service. The way it is insiders have to much power to manipulate and abuse the system for any private agenda. They need to install a better notification system for people who have identified themselves as concerned parties and the window needs to be pushed back to at least a fortnight or even 30 days.
Appreciate the reply, thank you. What is needed is an automatically generated email message to “owners” or concerned editors who do not live in the wiki. That should be a not to difficult fix. A message about a proposed deletion in the wiki would be more welcome in most mailboxes than another hundred notifications of 3rd party updates by FaceBook. Just title the Message something subtle, like “Warning your article at Wikipedia has been proposed for deletion.”
JMH:
Two processes to comment on, here. First, changes in Wikipedia. Comments here notwithstanding, Wikipedia is surprisingly transparent as to what changes have been made, if not to people’s motivations (which may not be transparent even to them). The “history” tab on every article will show you every change made to that article and who made it, and another click will take you to all the changes that person has ever made. Even deleted articles, while not publicly accessible, can still be examined in this fashion by administrators, who are many, and not as politically uniform (Wiki- or otherwise) as some will tell you.
The question of how Wikipedia decides “What is truth?” is an interesting one. Essentially, what Wikipedia accepts is the consensus of the outside world. It’s not a place to publish new discoveries or lines of reasoning–this was a decision made very early on, so that editors wouldn’t have to spend all their time arguing with cranks who have “proven” that the rest of the world is wrong and they are right. (This is a big enough problem as it is.) The problem with this, of course, is how to decide what that consensus is. A purely democratic poll of the world might yield you the revelation that Jews and/or the US government were the villains behind 9/11. OK, maybe we should only be soliciting the opinions of people who know something about a given subject. So in practice, Wikipedia tends to lean on academic scholarship and publications of the news media…both looked upon with great skepticism at certain times by BCers.
Certainly the news media are prone to getting it wrong; even a number of left-tilting Big Names in Wikipedia have said as much. Appearing in the news is not a great index of reliability. But no one wants to abolish appeals to authority entirely (because that tends to cede control of topics to monomaniac cranks with endless quantities of time for “reasoning”) and there’s no particular alternative authority to the MSM that would win general acceptance. I think this is where the (IMO) leftward tilt of Wikipedia makes itself felt. Because of the skew of the active editing demographic, Wikipedia’s collective judgment as to what constitutes reliable sources, undue weight, and so on tends to be colored by their philosophies. Nakedly political action (that is, externally political rather than Wiki-political) isn’t very common or accepted. People do try to maneuver their ideological adversaries into some breach of Wikipedia editing policies and guidelines to try to paint them as villains in the eyes of the uninvolved. A lot of the political/ideological struggle in Wikipedia occurs in that indirect, chess-playing fashion.
Well, thank you, bob! Although I should warn you that I am apparently “well past the age of status competition” (I’m in my late 40′s) and therefore ready for the dustbin as far as certain male commenters here are concerned.
This thread is mainly about the Wiki deletion and subsequent undeletion of the Belmont Club entry and I am not trying to change the topic, but it seems that on just about every Belmont Club entry I’ve read, someone touches on the topic of how women are naturally, well, fill in the blanks – we’re susceptible to totalitarianism, or polygamy, we’re gold-diggers and bimbos when young and raging harridans when old – and I can’t help but feel miffed and insulted. What women are being described here? Not me. Not the women I know. And I am not a woman who denies that there are differences between the sexes ( besides the obvious physical ones) or who cherishes playing the role of outraged and offended victim. I completely reject the biological determinism which denies women are capable of reasoning, abstract thought, and plain old common sense.
I resent being reduced to a being who only reacts via “emotional polemics” as Marie-Claude put it. Even the bit I quoted earlier: “they believe that if they are allowed to keep more of their own money, allowed to own guns, can make solid investments in a thriving economy to help insure their family’s future, that to them is “safety” and “security” they can put their hands around, because it is a self-imposed policy they designed for themselves as individuals and families.” although true, is incomplete, because it leaves out patriotism, the genuine concern for our country that I, and many women feel during the Obama era. Do men think patriotism is too “abstract” a love for women to feel, that women are concerned only with their immediate circle of family and friends and private concerns and nothing greater? Only men care about the Constitution and the words of the Founding Fathers? Well, Marie-Claude is a very fierce French patriot, I am a very fierce American one and we have argued in the past because of it:-) (It is perhaps inevitable that French and American nationalism will clash from time to time, the 2 patriotisms seem to smack into each other.) But according to certain men here, women are motivated by nothing but “bad boys,” (like, supposedly, John Edwards, LOL!) nanny statism, or immediate, personal concerns. I find it very insulting. But I’m over 27, and hence apparently a non-person, or non-female in Whiskey’s eyes. As a woman noted in the comments section of another blog, good luck finding a 27 year old who will stick around and take care of you when you’re an old geezer.
And this is where Wikipedia is failing, for the same reason Big Jouranlism is failing. Not becaue Wiki references the MSM, but because it attempts to claim the same mantle of objectivity that the MSM does. But of course that objectivity is a facade, maybe cynical in some cases, maybe well-intentioned and unnoticed in others, but there it is.
The result is, you can’t trust it. The appeal to authority makes the entire site a mouthpiece for whatever “authority” gets it’s foot in the door. The AGW crowd got its foot in the door at Wikipedia big time. What other subjects are likewise compromised?
It’s ironic that perhaps the most visible icon of crowdsourcing is actually just as much a dinasoaur as Dan Rather. Not just unreliable, but unreliable in the exact same way. That’s why I say it’s on a path to failure.
May I propose a thread on the Off Shore Drilling in the future for swallowing the entire Obama agenda now proposal? A good working title may be “Bait and Switch.”
Donna V,
Honestly, except for Habu today uncharacteristically channeling him, which may get a citation for trespass or copyright infringement, I think those murky waters that you do not want to navigate are considered the preserve of whiskey. I am sure that each of us can become fixated on some topics. On my best days I am the house Max Weber bore. Really I do not think that whiskey or anyone else is intentionally expressing hostility to women and while this is not my house I do not think that it is that hard to screen it out if you have to. Trying to keep the conversation alive without resorting to an LGF level of control is a sub-topic behind these last two threads. My instincts are to be much more controlling but all the evidence is that I would do a far worse job than wretchard does. My belief is that only one person has been invited to leave this Club in the last 4 years but that is just an opinion. Old threads tend to get sidetracked into special discussions on hobbies (guns) or religion or the honor of some country fond of cheese or simply nostalgia. The current thread should not and I am confident that your efforts to focus on the topic are appreciated.
Lifeofthemind,
The question of notification hinges on whether or not it’s opt-in. Trying to identify, without their input, who the “concerned parties” would be for any given article would be a nightmare. There aren’t enough people to do it, and then you run into issues of trying to connect a real-world identity to the Internet. OK, it’s easy enough to figure out who should be contacted regarding this weblog: whoever answers the email on the page. What do you do about J.D. Salinger, for instance?
An opt-in system is a problem of an entirely different order. The thing is, if people want notification about changes in articles, they probably want to hear about more than one, and they probably want to change which articles they’re monitoring now and then. That means you need to have some persistent means of storing their list and associating it with that person…so we’re right back around to opening a Wikipedia account. There’s no obligation to make edits and they don’t get closed for inactivity, after all; opening an account solely to monitor articles is quite acceptable.
The software does have a function to e-mail out changes to articles, but it isn’t enabled on the English Wikipedia. Editors typically have very large watchlists, and the volume of email would be overwhelming–much worse than Facebook. Apparently the developers are working on some possible solutions but it’s not clear when this will appear. See .
Not sure I’d agree about the length of the 7-day window, but that’s a matter of taste. The thing about PROD is that it is, in part, an evolutionary pruning of pages that, for whatever reason, are neglected. If no one notices the PROD tag on a page for (a week, a fortnight, a month), that also means that no one is going to notice vandalism or misinformation for the same amount of time, which means the page is slowly turning into a deceptive, attractive nuisance. I doubt there’s anything special about 7 days, though; that was probably carried over from the length of AFD discussions when PROD was invented. I do tend to think cases like this where something genuinely controversial gets deleted are the exception, rather than the rule. Usually a partisan shows up to rip the PROD tag back off, the original tagger sends it to AFD, and a merry slugging match ensues there over the article’s merits.
Donna V.
Oh, you women are all so touchy. I’m kidding, I really am kidding.
We creatures (of both sexes) are each an aminal brain preconditioned to certain behaviors, coupled with a human mind capable of reason and thought. In each individual, that second part will succeed or fail to whatever degree that person is truly civilized. The world has no shortage of men and women who squander the gift of humanity and live their lives as little better than animals. For them, biological determinism rules, since they’ve rejected reason. Their impact on the rest of us is not inconsequential.
I think there are two things we should ponder. First, what conditions in society will encourage humanity – encourage thought and reason over animalistic instincts. Second, for those who reject humanity, what behaviors can we expect out of them given the relatively predictable responses they will have, and how can we so order our civilization to minimize the damage.
If it helps, instead of talking about how “women” are this and that, maybe we should say “semi-civilized women” are prone to totalitarian polygamy and the other ills. Just as “semi-civilized men” are prone to joining murderous gangs that go around raping and pillaging. It might help us all keep in mind just how important civilization is, and give us some metrics to judge whether it’s getting stronger or weaker.
Also maybe gives us a way to think about policies – which ones will encourage under-civilization by rewarding it. We sure do a lot of that.
73. flying squirrel
Very nicely done….I will adjust accordingly….kudos to you and I just knew I shouldn’t have missed that class in school!
To my fellow contributors
Thanks for the support. As you must realize it is impossible for me to produce on the internet, of all places, “proof” of my lifes experiences. That’s just the way it is.
I don’t think any of us would do such a foolish thing. But believe me, I gain nothing by deceiving BC’ers I have simply had a very intersting life.
Best,
Habu
Lifeofthemind: I am not calling for anyone to be banned or censored. As a relative newcomer to this blog, I find whiskey’s statements about “what women want” as absurd and simplistic as radical feminism’s assertion that estrogen puts one on the side of the angels and all men (particularly white males) are itching to rape and brutalize. I had to endure whole semesters of listening to the latter form of nonsense, and it’s left me with a very short fuse when it comes to any sort of sweeping generalization about the sexes.
JMH, I agree very much with your comments.
I thank Nihiltres for showing up and answering my question, but I now have a bone to pick with him. Since I have a legal background, rules and definitions are important to me; the specific way in which any set of rules is written is important to me. Fortunes have been made and lost over a misplaced comma; lives have been saved or forfeited on the turn of a phrase.
Nihiltres stated that as long as we, the participants, would put some effort into offering up decent references, then this deletion would never happen again. I asked, “what qualifies as a “decent reference”, and how is one “offered up” in a way that will be recognized?”
Nihiltres offered up this page as a reference, the official Wikipedia rules for identifying “reliable sources.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS
So I read through this to see what was required, and to see if I could offer some such reference up. Here is the relevant terminology:
“Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable.
“Blogs” in this context refers to personal and group blogs. Some newspapers host interactive columns that they call blogs, and these may be acceptable as sources so long as the writers are professional journalists or are professionals in the field on which they write and the blog is subject to the newspaper’s full editorial control. Posts left by readers may never be used as sources.
Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. Self-published sources should never be used as third-party sources about living persons, even if the author is a well-known professional researcher or writer…”
So, the definition is written so that nothing found on the web about a web source like this one can ever possibly meet the requirement, unless it is “sponsored” by some established (and thus dying) media outlet. It is nothing but a way to edit out anything that does not meet with current established authority or approval, and it also is thus impossible for someone like me to ever find and “offer up” any reference that could meet this definition. Everything about a blog such as this exists outside of these rigid rules.
Well, there are some rules that allow “self published” entries, and they are:
“Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves, without the requirement that they be published experts in the field, so long as:
the material is not unduly self-serving;
it does not involve claims about third parties;
it does not involve claims about events not directly related to the subject;
there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity;
the article is not based primarily on such sources.”
Let me point out that these “rules” are so hazy and undefinable that in essence they mean nothing at all; they are simply a way to say that “anything we like is in, anything we don’t like is out” while wrapping it in a thin sheen of faux objectivity. What is “unduly self serving”, after all? Whatever the officiant making the decision wants it to be at the time, of course. Lesson to stick in your hat – always be on the lookout for vague language in any set of requirements; it is always the avenue by which a bureacracy can shade the outcome in any direction it wishes.
And in reference to a previous post in this thread, Yes, this is the virtual definition of Orwellian. Here are the procedures to follow; they are presented formally and with the appearance of good faith; and yet they are designed so that they cannot be followed no matter how sincere an effort is made. But of course, once they are not followed, then the victim has brought about his own fate by failing to live up to the requirements, no?
What is the worth of the Belmont Club? And how do you measure it?
There are a number of possible approaches to take. If you take the standards broadly suggested by Wikipedia it might merit a citation worthy of a small newspaper or one for a minor academic. Within their formal calculus being a small newspaper or a minor academic site would be all it could hope for. In any case nobody has the right to demand anything of Wikipedia it would not grant within its remit.
But that’s the wrong calculus, which is not to say it’s incorrect for Wikipedia, which can create its own purposes, but it wrong in general. The Belmont Club is a surprisingly powerful force on the Internet. It is more than its principal author and its reach surprises me continually. That is a large claim and the onus is on me to prove it, not just for the BC, but for other sites like it. For if it is true you ought to be able to measure it.
In other words, the real problem is to create a widely accepted metric whose validity will be generally accepted not necessarily in competition with Wikipedia’s but at least complimentary to it. Ultimately that means devising a workable concept rivaling the Wiki’s to solve the problem of measuring notability. That’s a big challenge. But one which I’m glad to be part of solving.
Wikipedia is playing within its own game and it is welcome to it — truly and without irony. But there is a bigger game and some are not content to play in it. I think we are starting to write some of the rules and create some of the methods. Indeed this contest is already on. In connection with that, I’ll make the following claims. That the concept of online reputation is a much more expansive notion than can ever be encompassed in the Wiki’s idea of notability. That within a relatively short time real and practical ways to capture this alternative idea of notability and use it will come into being.
The bottom line is that sites like BC ought not to aim primarily at rising within Wikipedia’s hierarchy of value so much as finding they can create their own. In the end, though the path may be tortuous, it will be found that important online communities, whether they conform to Wikipedia guidelines or not, are de facto important and it will be recognized one way or the other.
We are just at the beginning of the online age. The main chapters, the principal methods of initiating handshakes, of identifying trust networks, of making transactions and cooperation possible is just beginning. The Wiki has played a big and glorious part in it. But just a part and in the long run, only a small part.
Wretchard, you’ve done more serious thought on the concept of online reputation than just about anyone I can think of this side of Vernor Vinge. (and your ideas are much more practical than his) The Tocque project is a shining example; I can see you are trying to think of some method of expanding that to the net in general. Of course, we may end up moving towards a version of Vinge’s belief circles – and perhaps, at its core, human society has always been subtly arranged in that way.
On a lighter note, I’ve found a logo that could be slightly modified and which would be great for this blog (probably permission from the owner would be required, of course). This is from an absolutely gorgeous restored art deco hotel in Oak Cliff which is on a bluff overlooking downtown Dallas. I have actually been to a couple of events there, and it is well worth either the visit or the stay for those in the area. (there’s my plug for invoking their name and image!)
http://www.belmontdallas.com/
Just trade “club” for “hotel” in that logo and it’s perfect! Well, for my taste at least.
and fyi, it’s had that name since it was built in 1946:
http://www.belmontdallas.com/about/
(an obvious site for a meet up for anyone in the area!)
Hello everyone,
I am a new reader of a few weeks. Perhaps in future I will comment on regular topics, but for now I am still absorbing the atmosphere and learning the relationships and norms of Belmont Club.
I spent a long time last night composing a post for this topic only to wake this morning and find that much of what I wrote has already been said. Heh. So have revised to a different tangent.
JMH at #109 makes a key point. Up to a point, the premise of a community-edited (or crowd-sourced) knowledge base is very reliable, but only to a point, and it is a point that is much smaller than Wikipedia has been for a long time. At a small size, the contributors tend to have experiential and historical knowledge of their topic, but as the number of participants grow, randomization takes hold.
Add to that the tendency of new participants to have some sort of promotional interest and objectivity becomes as contaminated as if one had thrown dye into a pool. There is a stage beyond which an article has a 50/50 chance of either containing inaccurate material (and toss a coin to figure out which of the facts within said article are wrong and which are reliable) or of NOT containing essential material (such as the Medieval Warm Period mentioned above). Unless one is expert at the topic one is purusing, and unless that topic has no currently perceived political or commercial value, it grows more and more like looking at a set of keyword filtered search engine results.
Wikipedia has over time had to become more arbitrary, and rely more heavily on its vetted administrators in attempt to overcome this, and those good intentions probably are what keep it as effective as it is. As a knowledge base it has value – but the value is that of a randomly collected set of non-contextual memories, retaining only the form of an encyclopedia, but gradually shedding the substance.
This is a primary example of one way in which the world’s communities are trying to adjust to the changes brought by the technological revolution, and can serve as a model for evaluating other large systems that are on a similar path toward managed chaos. For example, what role has online trading played in the world’s economic situation? What role does it play in voting, including the counting of absentee votes and the demand for instant reporting of returns?
There tends to be a curious universality in the response of companies and agencies in handling these changes, and most get it wrong. Because they themselves are “following the leader” they don’t yet see just how wrong they are.
isn’t it funny that “Belmont” is a french village name at the origin !
http://tinyurl.com/ykkjsfw
uh Donna, might be that Whiskey was too poor to get a date when he was younger, my son at the beginning of his living in Paris said about the same thing, that girls were mostly interested in wealthy guis ! (especially in his middle, TV, Cinema, sport events businesses.) Now that he has a wealthier situation, I don’t hear him telling that anymore, seeing that he has so many “female” friends on his facebook, I suppose that he has no problem for dating anymore.
So, Whiskey, how rich are you ?
flying squirrel@73 wrote “Descartes; in this instance did he say anything at all? First, whom was he talking to? Did he succeed in making himself clear? Was he correctly understood?”
It can be reasonably argued that Descartes provided the foundation for modern science. Recall that Geometry was published together with Discourses. Had Descartes not developed the analytic geometry on which Newton and Leibniz built the calculus, western history would very likely have taken a different path. While Descartes is widely recognized by his quote ”Cogito ergo sum”, he might be best understood by considering his self description ”Omnia apud me mathematica fiunt” (“With me everything turns into mathematics.”)
Habu@70
Many more than a few believe you, I suspect. And you may count me in that number.
(This is not an empty statement. Although I comment infrequently, I have read or at least skimmed every comment in every thread since last May with one exception – that evening when the troll took control of BC.)
Also Pascal said of Descartes doubt, that it drives to Deism while scepticism logical end would be atheism
#119 Tina:
Welcome. That was very well put, and I look forward to further from you.
Now as to Nihiltres and ConservativeMutant and their appeals to authority.
“Crowdsourcing” under whatever name is not a bad first order approach to sorting out large volumes of data, with one huge caveat. The actors in the crowd have to believe, and act on the beliefs, that they are autonomous and working for themselves only. Once the concept is out there that by your own actions you can bias the “system” for your own benefit by falsification, then the closed universe of the Wiki collapses. This is especially so when the Wiki operates on the memory hole concept, deliberately changing the past to fit the current prejudices of the current writers, editors, and administrators.
Within the closed universe of Wiki; Ordnung ist Ordnung, und Befehl ist Befehl. However, there is a much larger world that views Wiki as merely a lever to move things for larger purposes. And at this point, those who are using Wiki for their own, larger, purposes have passed the critical mass necessary to destroy the basic credibility of the information contained therein.
It is a sad admission, but the Left is far more active and aggressive in trying to shape the conceptual battlefield than the Right or Centrists. This is a political truism. Right now the current writers, editors, and administrators of Wikipedia are rationally viewed, however accurately or not, as being ideologues who are willing, eager, and able to deliberately distort facts and information to deceive others. For those who follow such things, there is an equally rational view based on the history of detected deletions and distortions; that a significant fraction of those who put together and maintain Wikipedia are operating at the direction of “Troll Central”, a yellow building in the DC area that is a control node for the online efforts of Obama’s Agit-prop group Organizing For America.
As someone who has seen repeated proofs that Gresham’s Law applies in personnel matters as well as currency; I do have to wonder if the public debasement of the validity and credibility of Wikipedia has had an effect on the quality of their staff. I know that if I found out that an employee, prospective employee, vendor, or an acquaintance was part of Wikipedia’s chain of command that I would immediately discount their credibility and honesty, and separate myself from them as soon as possible. That may be part of the reason [beyond the normal and reasonable internet precautions] that they operate under pseudonyms.
Yes, Wikipedia is used. This is partially a function of its ubiquity in search results. But any careful user takes it with a grain of salt the size of Yucca Mountain, based on known distortions of fact that are maintained. I use Wiki, with great care. Mostly it is kind of like a dictionary. If I cannot remember the proper spelling of a name for sure, but know that I will recognize it when I see it, I will look at a Wiki article. Similarly for foreign phrases, if I will recognize as being correct when I see them. I will use images I find, if I recognize them as being correct [used one here a few days ago. I found the picture of ROKS CHOENAN I referenced, but I know the field well enough to detect any obviously false modifications and have, and used, other cross-references to confirm]. But any assertions of fact made in Wikipedia have a higher bar of proof to be met before use by credible researchers than say the New York Times, which is also of dubious reputation and yet is also still used in large part because of its ubiquity and cachet on the Left.
The one question that remains, is the degree of knowing culpability of the operators of Wikipedia in the distortion process. However for credible researchers, that question is subsumed in the larger problem of the existence of the distortions and politically motivated deletions and not being able to trust other information from that source.
I look forward to any comments by Nihiltres or ConservativeMutant on how the occulted internal processes of Wikipedia relate to their credibility outside the world of Wikipedia.
Subotai Bahadur
Donna V,
Please understand that I was neither disparaging your legitimate concerns nor presuming that you were seeking to define the terms of debate to exclude anyone. My interest was in exploring the background of how our little community operates, both for its own sake and to increase the comfort that ladies like you have in contributing. For myself, I still prowl the museums and wonder where Ann Miller is hiding.
Tina,
That was a very nice maiden speech. Welcome.
ConservativeMutant,
The mechanics of opt in systems have evolved with the web and Wickipedia seems to be behind the curve on many technical issues. The BC is full of underemployed and technically qualified people. Perhaps you should offer them 6 months of per diem to retool the engine. Your assurance that an internal committee is looking at the problem but it is slow to get to the English version of the project could have been phrased in a way that inspires more confidence. Given that the root of the problem is the not entirely unreasonable suspicion that senior editors of the wiki are conducting themselves in a manner reminiscent of the secretiveness and self serving arbitrariness of government bureaucrats the tone of your response, even if it all factually correct, did not ease my or I suspect others sense of concern. If you are someone senior to Nihiltres who has taken the time to enter this discussion then I thank you for doing so.
Subotai Bahadur,
Could you ask wretchard to erase your last and then take a couple of days off? I want to steal it.
#124 Lifeofthemind:
Neither Wiki-like memory hole, nor an enforced exile are needed. Use it at will, although credit would be nice *smile*.
Subotai Bahadur
wretchard-
You’ve made the big-time at last
Donna V-
Don’t let whiskey get to you – he is a social determinist (just like the feminists) and his theorizing is heavily influenced by television. Take it all with a grain of salt and keep your spirits up
LOTM-
Oh do stop wondering if people read your comments, you know they do. BTW (and OT) you never answered my question from awhile back about Patrick O’Brian
HABU @ 3:09 a.m.
Don’t get mad at us for laughing at you or not believing you. Most men who have accomplished great and dagerous thigs just don’t stand at the crossroads like you and blow their own horns (and then wrangle with peopel who don’t believe them). If you are really valient wise brave seasoned by dangers beyond imagining then let it come out in your writing and thinking.
Take our host, Richard, for example – he has faced dangerous if not life-threatening situations and he uses his experiences to reflect upon trust, faith, political change power, the afterlife….but he doesn’t hold his extreme experiences up as something validating in themselves…
Surely there has to be a chat room where you can go and talk about your very iteresting life…that time with the piano wire…that time with the hommade bullit…that time underwater…such an exciting life…can’t wait!
I have, from habit of mind, at irregular intervals, taken the time to circle back and check the state of my links. First as a courtesy to anyone who may come across a post long past and also to determine if others are tracking my trail of posts.
So far, in today’s initial review, of the first six, two videos that may or may not cause one to draw unflattering inferences have been deleted at source.
“Rick, Rick, you must hide me Rick”
“Randolph the Accountant”
Please feel free to draw even more inferences.
As I was writing the latest reply, I realized that there may be some misconceptions as to what an “administrator” is. Wikipedia jargon uses it in a different fashion than the normal use of the word. “Administrators” are editors who (through what is nowadays a very broken process combining the features of the public stocks and a good late Eighteenth-Century hustings at a contested election) are given access to extra tools, including the ability to delete pages, view deleted pages, block users, unblock users, and various other things. See Wikipedia:Administrators.
We don’t have any official connection with the WikiMedia Foundation (who own and run the servers) or budgetary authority or anything like that. Fortunately, we can’t be ordered to do things: I’m not obliged to go out and block people or delete pages or anything like that. (Indeed, I use the tools fairly rarely; mostly, I just edit pages like anyone else, on apolitical subjects because this is my hobby and I don’t need the additional stress of being chased by rock-throwing gibbons who think that, say, Barney Frank’s dice roll should go down the memory hole.)
I also realized I’ve been mis-formatting my links in the comments section here, which may explain some peculiar lacunae in my last comment. See this page for the discussion of email notification.
Subotai,
“Chain of command” and “staff” are phrases that give too much credit, by a few orders of magnitude, to the internal structure of Wikipedia.
My perception has been that the editorial slant of Wikipedia has more to do with the balance of its population and the fact, that, as you observe, the left has more time on its hands to try to fiddle these processes. In theory, resolving disputes over content in Wikipedia is nonpartisan; people form positions based on which side has presented the most reliable sources, the most well-rounded viewpoint, which has gone through the appropriate forms of cooperation and dialogue when opposed, and so on. In practice, this tends to mean that partisan warfare is just carried out at a higher level of indirection. It rewards a certain passive-aggressive type of personality: carefully saying within the letter of Wikipedia “law,” carry out a series of partisan actions until your opponent snaps and overreacts, breaking some rule, then, with great regret, report to the administrators this breach of rules by a lamentably biased and partisan editor. Because the composition of Wikipedia tilts left and “left-libertarian” (whatever that is), even administrators acting in good faith will find conservative opinions and positions more incredible and be more skeptical of them than they will find progressive opinions.
The general Wikipedia community is pretty prickly, in general, about editorial independence. There’s a communal fear that big interests with big money will manage to buy themselves a viewpoint. Is it happening anyway? Probably so, but Wikipedians are still very vehement about striking down its overt manifestations. This suspicion is normally directed against big corporations and PR firms, but if good evidence appeared (say, a cache of emails, like ClimateGate) that OFA had been coordinating editors, particularly ones that were high-profile within Wikipedia, the effect would be tremendous. There’s enough cultural pride left that even many of the leftists would turn on them.
As far as Wikipedia’s reputation goes, I think most people I know would regard it as a “good enough” solution–they know that there are liable to be inaccuracies and would not rely on the neutrality of the politically charged articles. But it’s a quick, easy way of getting a synopsis of most topics, even if that mental picture has to be corrected later on through input from other sources. The Wikipedia culture has shifted in recent years to lay a much heavier emphasis on “referencing”–providing citations to outside sources in articles. This is by no means a perfect guard against partisanship, but at least it makes it easier to evaluate and challenge. You can go look up and read the source yourself and see if you disagree with the article’s interpretation and you can examine the list of sources and see if there’s a skew to them for a particular article. Moreover, as an editor, you can challenge “facts” that Just Aren’t So when they lack a source, or the reliability or accuracy of a given source. It’s still possible to be outmaneuvered by more experienced editors acting in a partisan cause, but it does let you go in and call a foul on egregious nonsense.
In re pseudonyms, this is in part because Wikipedia deals with conflict of interest very poorly. Once your real-world positions and actions are identifiable, it just becomes one more stick for your opponents to thump you with. People also seem to take it very personally when you revert (undo) the edits they’ve made. I would rather not be the person who undid a series of poorly-thought-out edits by D*b F-_sch, for instance.
Generally speaking, I’d say Wikipedia is fairly safe for obscure and/or non-contentious subjects (how many species of lupine are there, 17th-century ships of the line, what is a Taylor series, what was the War of Saint-Sardos) but it hasn’t really figured out how to deal well with subjects where there are multiple, strongly-held points of view held by significant numbers of people. I share your distaste for enthroning the gilded corpses of entities like the NYT or CBS as authorities on the world. Appeal to authority is not a good way to find the truth; unfortunately, when you throw all topics open to discussion, the monomaniacs and cranks tend to be the best at advancing their points of view. They may be a minority of one, but they can carry the day through the sheer exhaustion of the majority. As a Dilbert cartoon once said, “Why is it that the most dysfunctional people define reality?” I suppose ostracism might be a solution, but Wikipedia doesn’t have very well-defined notions of a quorum, and that could turn into a tyranny of the majority in pretty short order (well, to an even worse extent that what exists today).
Lifeofthemind,
Sadly, as you can see from my reply above, I have no connection to the people with money to spend. I did find a page on how to get an RSS feed from your watchlist, and it looks as though there are tools to convert RSS feeds to email, so there may be a rather roundabout solution to the problem.
I missed this yesterday. To good not to share, even if late.
Democrats’ Rainbows and Unicorns
Off to the park with the kids (no school today).
Have a good day!
Papa Ray
re: wikipedia and the commons.
Could it be that with everyone responsible, no one is?
Maybe Murdoch has it right, we will eventually (re)learn that little of value is free, nor do we really want others to pay and shape it for us so it can be free to the viewer.
Consider the long-term value of the 50′s bread-and-circus for the masses – of soap-company funded broadcast television, news, radio…. And does the same apply to Rush? Or is his subscription service paying its own way?
Lifeofthemind and Subotai Bahadur, thank you for the welcome.
Ari Tai,
Honestly, I suspect it’s as much a matter of sheer volume more than anything else. Wikipedia attracts content additions and edits the way Belmont club attracts hits: I’d guess on the order of millions per month. I’ve never worked with Wikipedia nor edited there, so I’m not sure whether they have any paid staff – they used to be all volunteer – but even a wealthy corporation could never hire enough people to review that much activity. Most probably do conduct themselves properly, the fraction who don’t can be very persistent. As ConservativeMutant wrote above, the format doesn’t handle conflict of interest very well, and sometimes the good grow weary.
There’s a lot to your premise, about the need to pay our own way so that we respect the commons. Perhaps someone else can delve more into how the organization is funded monetarily, and whether there is a reward system for the average vounteer.
However, with regard to earning our keep through labor, a key value, I think, for Wikipedia’s community is that the set up creates unlimited opportunities for valuable and interesting, if avocational, work. Human beings need work more than we need sunlight, and Wikipedia is like an ever-expanding frontier. This prevents overcrowding and allows room for newcomers to find their own place, thus reducing some of the potential for territorial competition. And, the Little Red Hen who comes to Wikipedia gets a bit more help than usual because doing work is the only method by which one can participate in the community.
Another reason for its long-term success, as intentional communities go, is that the original concept is both expansive and geeky: the chance to be a librarian to the world. Thus, even now, I would bet that most new editors (of topics other than those with some kind of political/commercial/personal brand value) are going to arrive already well marinated in a core portion of the social contract that holds it all together. This constant infux of new arrivals who already share some of the cultural underpinnings would help to reinvigorate the long timers and keep them committed and involved.