User:Cecropia
|
|
I am placing some of my previous writings that I feel are superceded, unimportant in current context, or just plain moldy, in /Cecropia rants and mouldy fluff archive 1 in the interests of transparency, rather than simply delete them.
Quadell_seal_of_approval.PNG
| Contents |
Cecropia Lite
If anyone notices (or cares) that my presence has slowed down some lately, there are two reasons: one is that I simply have other things I have to do that have been lagging; but the other is that I'm making less time for Wikipedia for the moment. The reason for the latter is that I perceive, both from editing trends and the L'Affaire 172 and from comments about these, largely on the mailing list, that majority bias on political issues is going beyond de facto not quite to the point of de jure but as a sort of civil right.
The fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia used to give me hope (a little) that some kind of real NPOV could be enforced by open discussion, but now it appears to me that the ability to outlast an unpopular view, to "police" articles to force the majority viewpoint, to revert count, to threaten or use RfC or ArbCom and to hound out the disliked editor is accelerating.
I've settled to mostly editing noncontroversial material where I have some expertise, so what's my problem? The problem is that I see the bias that pours into political articles, and that the prejudice that this conveys to the unbiased reader (this is an encyclopedia, right?) infects the entire project. In short, it is not the substance of the bias, so much as the clubby-amateur-vanity-press air it exudes, that damages Wikipedia.
I am not picking up my marbles and leaving, I'm just stepping back and taking a few deep breaths. At a minimum, I will watch RfA as I feel I made a commitment when I ran for bureaucrat. Cheers to an overwhelmingly fine community, Cecropia | explains it all ® 21:19, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia at a [the?] crossroads
Recently a valued editor, 172, has left Wikipedia. He can be abrasive at times, and I have been at political loggerheads with him at other times, but he has represented what I fear is a shrinking commitment to quality at Wikipedia.
What perhaps bothers me more than his leaving (he is an adult, and capable of being responsible for his style, opinions, interaction with the community, and of course, whether he chooses to edit or not) is the recognition that Wikipedia appears to be increasing the power of the majority at the expense of those who think that history is not written by consensus and that Wikipedia's first purpose is to be an encyclopedia, not a club.
On the mailing list, I have seen expressions of "good riddance," and "he violated the sacred three-revert rule." More frightening is the concept that obeying "the rules" is more important than what is being reverted is truth or fiction.
I have great respect for the community; I refer to it often. But I fear that the trend of majority opinion being able to enforce ideology in articles, harass and even ban those who disagree with them will destroy Wiki's tenuous claim at ever being a quotable encyclopedia.
I see a trend at glorifying process over product. As someone who spent decades in publishing, this is the doom of respect for what is supposed to be an NPOV (Jimbo's core non-negotiable principle) encyclopedia. This may be the turning point of Wikipedia's birth, growth, maturation and decline. What a pity if it should decline without ever having fully matured.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I suspect Jimbo, our god-king, watches and doesn't interfere in this not only because he wishes not to impose his considerable influence on the project, but also because, for him, Wikipedia is a sort of experiment in Chaos Theory, and as has been noted about anthropologists, he doesn't want to spoil the social experiment by inserting himself into it too prominently.
- Jimbo responded on my talk page:
- Hmm, no, I'm not willing in any way to let the social experiment aspects of Wikipedia overtake the goal of a high quality encyclopedia. I'm not very interested in anarchic social experiments, except as secondary to our mission here. Now, this doesn't mean that I am going to start cracking down on every little thing I don't approve of, of course. The community is of crucial importance. But the community -- the real community -- needs to feel confident that I'm saying that quality work is what we're all about, and we don't need to worry about being taken over by trolls. --Jimbo Wales 18:48, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia and Me
I had been accessing Wikipedia for a while, mostly for easy-to-convey tidbits about math, physics and other subjects while reviewing my elder daughter's schoolwork before I realized the nature of the project. I edited a few pieces before getting a username, then began editing as Cecropia at the end of December, 2003.
- I became a sysop on April 13, 2004.
- I became a bureaucrat on June 24, 2004.
I am happy to help editors in areas that sysops are charged with taking care of whenever I can, including page protection/unprotection in appropriate circumstances. Feel free to get in touch with if you need sysop help.
Bureaucrats are charged only to seeing to the promotion of editors to sysop status, and this responsibility is only performed on the basis of community consensus.
Except when performing the above specialized duties, I write, edit, and speak in my status as editor, like every other Wikipedian. Cheers! -- Cecropia | Talk
Articles I started
Here are the articles I began, best as I can figure out. I've tried to avoid stubs and redirects—i.e., these were started with at least some useful content, sometimes a lot, and sometimes I added to the articles later.
I have slowly begun adding articles that I didn't start but have written from stubs, marked with * or have significantly rewritten or added to, marked with a †.
Useful links
- Wikipedia:Policy Library
- Wikipedia:Cite your sources
- Wikipedia:Verifiability
- Wikipedia:Wikiquette
- Wikipedia:Conflict resolution
- Wikipedia:Brilliant prose
- Wikipedia:Neutral point of view
- Wikipedia:Pages needing attention
- Wikipedia:Peer review
- Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
- Wikipedia:Village pump
- Wikipedia:Boilerplate text
Full disclosure: I cribbed these from Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit§ion=new). Thanks, Sam!
Some thoughts on Wikipedia and Wikis
I'm fascinated by Wiki's ability to become a storehouse of knowledgeable arcana that usually receives short shrift in other encyclopedias. If arcana aren't exactly the bricks of the house of knowledge, they're at least the pebbles in the mortar.
I find this a wonderful experiment in establishing a free, useful resource for the wide world. Even edit wars and an overall bias that may be seen in certain articles can be useful for future scholars and historians (since the edit history is all archived) to see what arguments were raging at a given point in time and to try to assess the positions and biases of the (often faceless) protagonists for one view or another.
Some of personal curiosities for the future of Wikis include:
- will contentious articles even out in the end, or will they end up representing the POV of the most persistent?
- will the unspoken, even unconscious, biases of whoever constitutes the bulk of contributors eventually drive away honest contributors who adhere to a different view?
- will a valuing system eventually be placed on articles?
- will Wikis resist becoming hierarchial or "clubby"?
- will hard-and-fast rules begin to replace consensus?
- like other new and exciting ideas, like ... erm ... Marxism, will we one day see a WikiInc® keeping the framework but destroying the intent of Wikipedia? (eventually to be bought out by a Microsoft)?
- sort of like the above, will a wonderful and well-thought out experiment someday see its Jimbos replaced by its Josefs?
If anyone has thoughts on these issues, please place them in my Talk, not here.
Interests
I've been writing or editing on a wide if odd mix of subjects of interest, including (in no particular order) Great Expectations, Egg Creams, Coney Island Creek, Anti-semitism, Autism, Freedomland U.S.A., Dog catcher, Jukes and Kallikaks, Multiple-unit train control, Good (accounting), L. Sprague de Camp, Terrorism, Law of land warfare, Vietnam war, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, Kristallnacht, Red herring, Yellow ribbon, Asymmetric warfare, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Illegal combatant, Autistic savant, Political subdivisions of New York State, War crime, Wesley Clark, George W. Bush, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, New York subway, Fulton Fish Market, General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, Malbone Street Wreck, Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, and others I'm too lazy to think of at the moment.
I have a POV about certain subjects which I try to be open about; no point really, people usually see through users who make obviously partisan changes under rubrics such as "the article is too big," "this belongs somewhere else," and my favorite: "I don't have a POV, everybody else has a POV." :) But I have been writing for a long time (my first paid article was written for the long-extinct New York Journal-American) and I make an effort for my edits and contributions to be NPOV or to balance existing POV, to be accurate and, if controversial, to be well-documented. At any rate, I stand behind the integrity of anything I write.
Personal stuff
Since I'm pushing social security age, I've worn a lot of hats in my lifetime. The only more or less common thread that's moved in and out of my life is programming and computers. When I began in the trade, COBOL and Fortran were the thing, and loading your program meant begging a cranky Univac not to chew your punch cards. Now I'm very next Tuesday with Linux and web services and all. Learning UNIX back when was a big help and I'm a Novell CNE, which I guess is also kind of dinosaurish now.
But I've also been:
- A typographer (set type by just about every means there is except Monotype)
- A printing foreman
- A military instructor in the U.S. Army
- A military policeman
- A technical writer
- A transportation analyst
- A writer of local social, physical and political history
- A rescuer of fair maidens
- A husband and father, unexpectedly perhaps my favorite role
Politically, my family was liberal/socialist. I was a lifetime Democrat, but dropped my registration in 1998 and am now officially an Independent. I am a 30-year plus labor union member and former union steward. I have libertarian leanings but am too libertarian to join that or any other party any more. I retain my liberal belief in the basic goodness of humans but also feel that people sometimes poison their minds when they adhere to groups instead of seeing others as individuals.
I have been involved in advocacy and public speaking on various topics across the political spectrum. I am the father of an autistic child and am interested in the science, education, and social treatment of those with different and altered abilities.
Favorite quotes
I'm afraid some of these are necessarily quite heavily paraphrased, where I don't have access to the original quote. Presented in no particular order.
- The father of an old friend, who told his teenaged son, as they were about to depart for "resettlement in the east" during wartime Germany: "Have courage. Everyone dies. It's just a matter of when." The father, son and his brother survived. The friend's mother and sister were murdered.
- Bob Dylan, early in his career, commented on the bevy of pundits and critics who were trying to "expose" him: "Don't they understand? I expose myself every time I walk on the stage."
- William J. Ronan, once head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York): "What small bits of power people fight over."
- My dad, when I was about to pursue our family dog under the couch: "Don't follow him there. Even an animal needs a safe place."
- Also my dad, after I had lost a favorite toy: "Don't be too upset about something that can be replaced with only money. The most important things can't."
- Paul McCartney, commenting on his attitude toward rumors of The Beatles reforming: "You can't rewarm a souffle."
Favorite poems
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
—Francis William Bourdillon
And only if my own true love was waiting
and if I could her heart a'softly pounding
Only if she were lying by me
could I rest in my bed once again
—Bob Dylan, "Tomorrow is a Long Time"