Apr 1, 2017
well so much for arbital
post-mortem on LessWrong
the site is now a coming-soon
at least it didn't turn into citizendium.
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well so much for arbital
post-mortem on LessWrong
the site is now a coming-soon
at least it didn't turn into citizendium.
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Skolmedicin - Alternativmedicin: Striden mellan vårdfilosofier som bör samarbeta
Skolmedicin – Alternativmedicin: Striden mellan vårdfilosofier som bör samarbeta
DEBATT. Det pågår idag en märklig strid i västvärlden mellan två hälsovårdsfilosofier. Den ena kallas skolmedicin och den andra alternativ eller integrativ medicin. Det senare begreppet integrativ står för att alternativ ska kunna integreras med ”etablerad” skolmedicin. Dessa två har kunskaper som borde gå hand i hand för att kunna erbjuda vårdsökande alternativ.
I Indienär det redan ett faktum.…
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Wikipedia stats: weekend traffic as a clue to determining 'seriousness' of articles?
In all the meta-discussion that goes on around Wikipedia and Wikipedia-style sites ([Citizendium](http://en.citizendium.org/), for example), one of the frequently recurring themes is the role of pop culture in building an encyclopedia.[^2] Lots of people turn their noses up at Wikipedia because of the sheer amount of attention paid to Pokémon compared to perhaps more serious topics like politics, science, the arts and so on. There's something very important here in terms of building policies regarding accuracy: to me, it matters significantly if the article on, say, evolutionary biology is inaccurate in a way that it doesn't matter if the article on Britney Spears is inaccurate. When designing policies and building community infrastructure around a project like Wikipedia, it seems important to build them to ensure that articles that are about "serious" topics get cared for more than articles on popular topics, because those articles have more real-world significance. If Wikipedia has the wrong date for a Britney Spears single, the knock-on effects of such inaccuracy are less significant than having the wrong dates about something like the Balfour Declaration. In an ideal world, there would be no inaccuracies and everything would be perfect. But this is not an ideal world. I went on to [Emw's article stats page](http://toolserver.org/~emw/wikistats/) today to find out about some article stats for various things I've been helping with: specifically the [Hallmarks of Cancer article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer) which got written about on the BBC News website and in the Times of London (and, slightly less significantly, [this week's Signpost](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-04-04/In_the_news)). I also nominated it for a DYK, so it'll be interesting to see whether BBC News sends it more traffic than a DYK does. But statistics are addictive and very useful.[^1] So I started punching in all sorts of articles on topics I'm interested in, mostly in philosophy. I tried John Rawls and Thomas Aquinas and Philosophy of Science. I was only interested in recent stats, so I set it to only show me the last 63 days (from 1 February onwards). One interesting thing I found recurring through all the philosophy-related pages I looked at was a drop in views at the weekend: like clockwork, there'd be a huge drop in page views on Saturdays, and then a slight nudge upwards on Sundays, then back to a steady number during the week. I kept on trying: Bertrand Russell, William of Ockham, Friedrich Nietzsche (extravagantly so!), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Locke. A few didn't fit: Saul Kripke and Gottlob Frege. But most of the articles I tried in philosophy fitted the pattern. I did not find this effect when I searched for pop culture related topics: I tried a variety of video games and pop musicians/rock bands. A tentative hypothesis lurks there: if Wikipedia is being used as a quick reference by university students, school students, teachers and lecturers during the week, that would explain why there seems to be a dip at the weekend. (And an even more ad hoc explanation: on Saturday, people are going out and having fun or watching TV, on Sunday they are doing their homework, hence more pageviews on Sunday than Saturday.) But because movies and TV shows and pop music are *fun*, people still read about them on Wikipedia at the weekend, while academic articles are more of a work thing for people in universities. There's a whole stack of things one needs to control for, and this is a long way from being confirmed. It's still a very early hypothesis. Firstly, I've only used a very limited sample: a few dozen articles, and limited them in scope to the intersection of philosophy articles and things which came into my mind this afternoon. If further statistical analysis pans out, it may be possible to use such a correlation to help with directing academic contributors through WikiProjects, selection of featured articles and other featured content (DYKs etc.) and a whole lot of other stuff. It could also simply be useful to help sort articles within WikiProjects: for generalist or broad WikiProjects like United Kingdom or Europe or United States or Biology, being able to statistically sort "serious/academic" articles from more entertaining or frivolous/pop culture articles may be useful. I mean, imagine if a musicologist turns up at Wikipedia and wants to help with writing articles about music: being able to nudge them towards the academic topics may be a useful thing. Rather than keep this bottled up in my head, I thought I may as well share it so others interested in statistical analysis of wikis like Wikipedia and on the debate over academic contributions to sites like Wikipedia can use this as a starting point for further analysis of the data. [^1]: Especially for outreach: being able to tell people working inside existing institutions like museums or scientific research laboratories or universities or whatever that topics they work on are viewed however many thousands of times a day makes the question of contributing to Wikipedia less of a matter of idealistic hippie sharing and more of a public information and education issue. You can write a scholarly monograph and maybe 50 of your peers will read it. Or you can fix an error on Wikipedia and a few hundred or thousand people—men and women on the Clapham omnibus!—will read it. On average, about 6,000 people a day read the Wikipedia article on John Locke. And about 7,700 people a day read the article on cancer. [^2]: I heard a guy a while back talking about building a language variant of Wikipedia–one of the African languages–and he said that pop culture and sport brought people in and got them editing. They may start editing not so important articles, but they would often progress to editing more serious stuff. So we should probably be careful not to slag off pop culture articles too much.
Sanger meets Schneider; I hit the bottle
A while back, I blogged about an interview with Daniel Dennett by a rather pompous windbag called Dan Schneider. Well, now said pompous windbag has interviewed Wikipedia co-founder and Citizendium founder Larry Sanger.
It's sort of entertaining in a way. I mean, I downed the equivalent of four cups of coffee in energy drinks before setting off by train on a very slow sojourn through the south of England last night, and by the time I ploughed through all 40,000 words of Schneider v. Sanger, I desperately wanted to glug a whisky and ibuprofen cocktail to take the pain away.
If you go to public lectures, you know there's always that one person who asks a question at the end. Only it's not a question: it's a rambling, meandering monologue. Eventually it hits five minutes and they have seemingly asked just about everything under the sun about pretty much nothing at all. The only reason they've sat down is they've run out of breath. If they had a pull-string on them, you could give it a tug and they'd spew shit for another five minutes. Now you get to enjoy that uncomfortable pause as the rest of the audience and the speakers try desperately hard to work out and salvage something from that pointless intervention. Bottle that train-wreck aesthetic and put it online and you've got Schneider's literary interview series.
On Citizendium, for instance, he bangs on about the "fascism" of "credentialism", which ignores the fundamental policies of the site and is apparently relayed at second hand from an anonymous source.1 The problem with the expertise policy on Citizendium is that it has been misapplied or badly implemented. The problems with Citizendium come down to boring things like management and bureaucracy and a whole load of other very down-to-earth things, rather than the vision itself. The other problem is that Wikipedia has grown through most of it's painful episodes, and Citizendium has been cursed with quite a number of unproductive editors who have been banned from Wikipedia (I won't name names, but anyone who follows these things will know who I am talking about). Their bans from Wikipedia may not have been for the best of reasons and may indeed be examples of 'the right result for the wrong reason'. And because the accumulated policy cruft isn't there on Citizendium, said people turn up and the tools aren't there to really do anything about them. So they push their own personal points of view and fail to be neutral and so on. The policies on Wikipedia have been tested by repeated application, while Citizendium's haven't. And because of the way Citizendium works, those policies aren't going to be tested in the real world because of the lack of critical mass.
In other words, Wikipedia is run by common law with admins as magistrates, while Citizendium as it currently stands is run by an elaborate bureaucracy, the political battles of which now seem to occupy almost all of the attention of the community as opposed to actually writing content. The fundamental problem with Citizendium is too much bureaucracy too soon, and that the Benevolent Dictator has gone too quickly. With Wikipedia, the Benevolent Dictator (Jimbo) may perhaps have outstayed his welcome; with Citizendium, he perhaps disappeared far too quickly.
That's roughly my view now anyway. I don't have any animosity though, and I'm completely disinterested in the personal and political side of it, which is most of the reason I left the CZ EC: because interpersonal political bickering is just completely uninteresting to me. As MeatballWiki puts it: Fighting Is Boring. I just want more and better information online delivered under free licenses because, well, Wikipedia is a lot less dysfunctional than the existing institutions of newspapers and the entertainment industry. I'm ultimately a pragmatist (on Internet encyclopedias anyway), so whatever works. Wikipedia vs. Citizendium is like Linux vs. GNU Hurd. In open content communities, like open source, competition ultimately is just another word for cooperation. If you want to see people argue the toss over Citizendium, try RationalWiki.
Anyway, so you are reading the Sanger interview and you think it might get interesting and the interview might veer into some constructive discussion of exactly what could be fixed about the varying models of running, say, Wikipedia vs. Citizendium vs. some other online Wikipedia-like encyclopedia, and Schneider wanders off into discussing his own theories and ideas like he seems to do in every other bloody interview he does.
So rather than getting some in-depth specifics about what Larry Sanger is best known for: namely, helping start Wikipedia and running it in the first year, and then going off and starting Citizendium, you get Schneider still being butthurt about how Dan Dennett basically didn't give a shit about his question about why Time Magazine didn't put Genghis Khan on their list of the top people of the millennium or whatever. It's pretty good car-crash-TV to see Larry very gently noting that it may not be Dennett who is at fault in this relationship.
It's a shame. Whether you agree with Larry or not, he's obviously an interesting guy, and it'd be interesting to hear his views about Wikipedia and so on at some length. A 40,000 word interview would be a good place to do it, if only it was done by someone who could put his own ego on hold. A few interesting tidbits do appear in amongst a seemingly endless cycle of confirming the truth of the Dunning-Krueger effect over and over again.
But, in Schneider's defence, surely he manages to get Larry Sanger to explain his views on philosophy? He is being interviewed as an epistemologist rather than for his role in Nupedia, Wikipedia and Citizendium. Well, Schneider fails on that front too. He does elicit a few interesting nuggets, but he fails to actually ask about Sanger's specific research interests or elicit his views on any of the stuff that is of interest to contemporary epistemologists, despite us being in the fortunate position of living in a time after Gettier sent everyone back to the epistemological drawing board. Far be it from me to suggest that the reason Schneider failed to ask much in the way of good questions about Sanger's philosophical views despite 40,000 words of space to do so is probably because Schneider doesn't really understand philosophy very well.
If you don't want to spend hours reading this dreck, let me pull out a few choice samples.
There's lots of pomposity:
I believe that artists are fundamentally different, intellectually, than non-artists, and that the truly great artists are even more greatly different from the average artists than the average artist is from the non-artist. [...] What are your thoughts on this? Are their current philosophers who might be considered visionaries in a hundred or more years? Who are they? Is there one discipline of philosophy that lends itself more to creative or visionary thought? And, if you are copacetic with such a system, where on the scale would you place yourself?
Schneider attempts to do some philosophy:
Is why? the ultimate query? If so, what is the ultimate answer? Is it why not? Is it because!? Or is that just super-simplistic philosophic bullshit that someone is better off simply saying so? to? And is so? the best and/or safest reply to any philosophic query?
And rightly gets rebuked by Larry:
Pseudo-philosophical bullshit seems like the best description of all of this.
Perhaps the most bizarre bit of this train wreck:
If you are familiar with UFO lore, you know that many people who claim to be abductees of extraterrestrial sexual experimenters only recall their traumas long after the fact. This is akin to the now verified False Memory Syndrome that has exculpated false claims of sexual abuse rings, Satanic torture, and a myriad of other bizarre claims. You must know of the work of the late psychiatrist John Mack, and his work with claimed alien abductees. He grew to believe in the mythos. So, if memories can change, is the past in any way mutable? And, is the past safer than the present or the future because we know how it turned out?
Where to start? That's like a poster child for fractal wrongness. The more you think about it, the more wrong it is. And then you zoom in on a particular and it's even more wrong. And then you ponder the mind of whoever thought this was a good theory and bloody hell, you pile so much wrongness up and it topples over causing a veritable earthquake of wrong.
Firstly, what the fuck kind of question is that? If you ask anyone with a modicum of sense, the answers are "No" and "I haven't got a fucking clue what you are talking about" respectively. I mean, seriously, Schneider thinks that memories not being stable and accurate over time means the past is potentially 'mutable'. That's like all those people who think "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?" is some kind of important philosophical problem, when it has a clear and simple empirical answer: namely, yes.
If a newspaper says that Brussels is in France, does it in some sense make it in France? No. If the evil psychologist of so many philosophical thought experiments wired me up to a computer and made me start having, oh, some thing very much like the mental state I would have if I were to believe that Winston Churchill was still alive, it wouldn't suddenly make him alive, or make the "past mutable". It would mean in the first instance that the newspaper got something wrong and in the second instance that my mental states do not always accurately reflect the outside world. In other words, the world doesn't give a shit what you think.
If you take the possibility seriously that someone having memories that do not accurately reflect facts about the past means that the past is "mutable", you need to be smacked around the head a few times with an undergraduate epistemology textbook. This sort of thinking almost borders on what Dan Dennett calls a deepity. It has a meaning that is very obviously true but unimportant and it has a significant meaning which is total bullshit.2
As Sanger points out, it is especially amusing to hear this kind of utter nonsense from someone who rails so vehemently against 'subjectivism' (and postmodernism and political correctness et al.)! Apparently, subjectivism is the source of all evil in art and aesthetics, but subjectivism about the external world is perfectly fine because how else would we be able to explain the mental states of people who think they've been abducted by aliens?! Enquiring minds want to know!
So that's all fun and games if, like me, you have something of a tolerance for watching people fail badly at philosophy (Schneider that is). But why on earth are you asking the co-founder of Wikipedia whether or not he's familiar with "UFO lore"? Besides the aforementioned car crash value, what is the reader supposed to glean from this? Am I supposed to be impressed by how wide ranging an intellect Schneider has or something? (I'm really not.) I hear a lot of interviews on the radio and in the best interviews the interviewer is asking exactly the sort of questions I would want to ask and otherwise keeping out of the way. The skilled interviewer isn't there to talk about themselves. People don't tune into Desert Island Discs to hear Sue Lawley or Kirsty Young, they tune into hear something interesting about the guest, with music as a proxy for their personality.
Interviewing is fundamentally a very modest matter: as Kierkegaard said of Socrates, one is serving as a midwife, bringing things out of the student (or interviewee). Sometimes an interviewer needs to be a bit strong-armed and do the Jeremy Paxman routine, but the point is to let the interviewee do the talking. An interviewer who spends his whole time puffing himself up is like a teacher whose only role is to show how much cleverer he is than his students. It may make him feel better, but what value is there in that to anybody else? Go beyond that Socratic (or an emotional variant thereof of the Socratic) role and, to use the Kierkegaard analogy, you end up having to play the role of Jesus. And while a good interviewer can occasionally pull off Socrates, he or she will always fail at being Jesus by dint of, oh, not being the son of God.
Here's a hint for wannabe interviewers: if multiple interviewees (including smart folk like Dennett) tell you repeatedly and at length that they are having a really hard time working out what the bloody hell you are actually trying to say, you should seriously consider rethinking your technique.
On his website, Schneider modestly describes his interview with Steven Pinker as "One of the greatest interviews ever recorded". This is an interview where a huge chunk of it is Schneider quoting different chunks of his own reviews of Pinker's books back at him and asking him for responses, and the rest of it asking the exact same questions he asked to Dennett and Sanger about his half-baked theories and philosophies. In an interview, Schneider himself is asked who he thinks the greatest living "visionary poets" are. The phrase "Excluding myself" appears in the answer. I kid you not. As for why you you've never heard of him, the greatest living visionary poet? That's all a conspiracy by the publishing industry and stupid idiotic "deliterates" who spend all their time watching American Idol rather than reading his ingenious works of poetry, as he explains repeatedly and at length in interviews with anyone who'll listen.
Interestingly, the interview with Pinker contains a number of questions which are the same word-for-word as the interview with Sanger. As if the interviewee is simply a disciple or a sounding board, someone to sit at the feet of the Great Artist and quietly nod in approval. For a writer of such obvious Greatness, it is interesting how easily you could produce a computer programme to churn out these interviews. Basically, you just take an existing template and just throw in a few phrases from the Amazon.com descriptions of the published works of the author being interviewed and hit send.
I wish I could have said this interview "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read) but sadly it was "too long; did read". And now I need to find where I stashed that whisky to make the memory of it go away as quickly as possible. To restate a question that the Man of Considerable Greatness asks, if I numb the pain with enough alcohol and painkillers to sedate a pony, does that make the interview in some sense less awful? Sadly not.
That's an awesome interview technique by the way: when you have a public website you can go and look at with your own eyes, you instead rely on the testimony of one anonymous individual. Also, really? Really? It's "fascistic" to run a wiki where experts are asked to sign off on articles? The worst you can say about is that it doesn't work or that the selection of experts is problematic. But to suggest that any issue in the debate over the relative merits of wiki-based encyclopedia projects approaches the level of "fascism" is really a bit OTT... ↩︎
Okay, let me give it a shot. If events that happened in the past have as some mereological component mental states that are happening now or in the future, there is a way in which this view can be true. Imagine we have some abstract object that represents a past event, such that it is contingent on abstract objects of the same broad type. And we say that such an event has a mereological relationship with present brain states that are related to the event, and those brain states have a causal chain of history between them as they change or degrade over time. So, you've got the event (E1) and it has some unspecified relationship R1 with one or more mental state sets (MSS1), which themselves have a different relationship with a chain of mental states (MS1...MSn). We can pick any mental state from MSS1, and it has a relationship to E1. In as much as the set of mental states attached to a particular event change, it is possible to say that the event E1 changes. In as much as one believes that the event has as a direct property or mereological component of itself a set of mental states that have a relationship with that event, then the mutability of events based on mental states about them in the future is obviously true. But I don't see any good reason to accept this sort of account because it doesn't get you anywhere useful, and it throws up oddities. I mean, the idea that, say, the Battle of the Somme would have been different if I had not been born seventy-odd years later is far too ontologically queer for me. ↩︎
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Citizendium Editorial Council: resignation statement
For regular readers of my blog: I am using my blog as a place to put this only because there doesn't seem a better place to speak my mind openly and freely without having my honestly written words getting mangled or removed for being "intemperate" or "inflammatory" or whatnot. I hereby resign from the Citizendium Editorial Council. I wish the remaining members luck; they will need it. Before providing the reasons for my resignation, let me first note that I am fully in support of the founding ideals of the Citizendium project. I do think that Wikipedia needs some competition. The BSDs and Linux compete without much animosity.[^5] I fully support the principle of the real name policy and I agree that experts should be given a slightly elevated role in the running of certain open culture and wiki projects. My resigning from the Editorial Council does not mean I intend to leave the Citizendium project as an author. As long as the Citizendium project respects and welcomes my contributions[^3] and does not waste my time with crazy bureaucratic bullshit, I will freely contribute my knowledge to it as I do for a number of other wikis and open culture projects. My support for the principles of Citizendium – although not the often heavy-handed implementation of those principles – comes from experience of the open source community: in many open source projects, you have to earn your stripes before being given responsibilities like the ability to commit code to the trunk repository. Contributions that come from experts working with their real name *are* valued more than fly-by-night anonymous contributors with goofy names like "1337 h4x0rxorz!" The people who I have worked with in the open source community have, for the most part, acted professionally, responsibly, like adults, using real names and welcoming contributions, judging them in a open but meritocratic way. Code I push up to community repositories has to be high quality. If it isn't, I cannot complain if it does not make it into the released project. Code I have pushed into community repositories has often been worked on for weeks before being merged with the main repository. The high use of unit testing and other similar quality assurance techniques in open source software modules is a testament to an increasing professionalism which I heartily support. I reject the claims of some Wikipedians that we cannot have real names and the like in wiki projects. If developers in open source can do it, those trying to build encyclopedias and open culture/open knowledge should be able to do it too. The only justification given for not having it seems to be the “I don't want my [boss or evil government overlord] to know I'm writing about [controversial topic here]”. This doesn't seem to be enough of a justification for the cost of anonymity (and, well, you can make the odd exception). The communities I work in tend to favour this and achieve it without requiring it: open source communities, standards bodies and so on. No, I am resigning from the Editorial Council simply because I believe the council to be dysfunctional and the current governance model is not sustainable and is also out of step with the needs of the community at this point in time. Some members of the council have attempted to pin the blame on Howard C. Berkowitz (and, more recently, on myself). I have worked with Howard on the main wiki and he has been pleasant, helpful and professional if a little long-winded at times (generally, pleasantly so). His contributions have been outstanding and are obviously a testament to a life of experience. Others inform me that Howard is not like this towards them. They hint at various things but do not provide any evidence for their assertions. I'm not participating in a whisper campaign: present evidence and resolve things openly but don't keep the flame of personal bickering alive with veiled accusations, secretive e-mail threads and a back and forth of meta-accusations. In [EC-2010-013](http://locke.citizendium.org/cz_ec/EC-2010-013), Howard has been singled out for reasons unexplained. As I noted in my comments, the punishment does not fit the supposed crime; and no justification is given for the punishment beyond simply that Howard is hard to work with. I'm betting if you asked House Republicans if they had found Nancy Pelosi easy to work with, they probably would have said "no". But they didn't have the opportunity to simply vote her out – only the voters get that right in a democracy, not the politicians. Every single decision we have attempted to make has been sullied and distorted by a personal argument I frankly haven't got the time or patience to mediate or even navigate. Tantek Çelik calls this kind of thing a [Denial of Productivity attack](http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19402891/DenialOfProductivityAttack). The tasks I have made a priority for myself are reforming the workgroup system, resolving the problems with pseudoscience and figuring out if we can reform Citizendium policy so we can make good on Larry Sanger's rather too optimistic promise of 100,000 articles by 2012. It was always a long shot to begin with: an optimistic pipe dream for most of us, not a realistic expectation. Something to hope for, a positive goal to aim for. But once you deal with dysfunctional processes for long enough, you lose hope. I lost mine weeks ago. I've stuck with the process because I feel a sense of loyalty to the Citizendium community, and some sense of duty to those who voted for me in the perhaps naïve belief that the Editorial Council might not be a total clusterfuck. I've had to fight back against the imposition of absolutely pointless bureaucracy. It has been like the scene from Douglas Adams' "Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy" where they task the hair-dressers with discovering fire, so they form the Fire Discovery Subcommittee who then decide they need to do consumer focus groups to decide how best to market fire. Certain people in the Citizendium community take all our talk of "democracy" and "country" and "republic" and "citizenship" to be more than a metaphor and turn what should be a relatively lightweight process - managing a damn wiki – and make it look like something out of *Yes, Prime Minister*. When I first started on the Editorial Council, I attempted to try and get people to start working on finding solutions to a variety of practical problems so we could get down to business. Shortly thereafter, an e-mail got accidentally sent to me from one member of the EC to another (I shall not name names: I have some class) asking them to please pay attention to what I was doing as I was "trying to push my ideas". How dare I push my ideas? Of course, I wasn't doing anything of the sort. I have been elected with a mandate to try and fight for the things the electorate voted me in for. Instead, I was trying to push the bureaucratic clutter out the way so we could get on with some actual substantive issues. If I had been "pushing my ideas", so fucking what? It is a wiki, not a country, despite certain delusions to the contrary. And I know about delusions of grandeur first-hand: when I was an undergraduate, I was on the Student Union. They needn't have worried. In the weeks since I was elected, I haven't had a chance to push any ideas of any consequence. What I have been subject to is repeated, abusive e-mails between other EC members. Where in the Charter does it say e-mails consisting of the words "JUST FUCK OFF" count as intelligent, reasoned discourse in leading the community? I bet you at certain points certain people on the U.S. Supreme Court want to tell Scalia to just fuck off. Part of being a grown up is that you at least squabble about grown up things. Or better yet, you don't squabble. You disagree without being disagreeable as the saying goes. Instead of representing a calm and rational approach to problem solving and decision making, the e-mails in my EC folder represent an shrill, insane, paranoid view of the world. Every time a critical message goes up on the forum or on RationalWiki or wherever, paranoid scuffling goes on. Maude Flanders' famous outburst of "[Think of the children!](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo) We must do something! Anything!" suddenly becomes the rallying cry. Posts start disappearing and e-mails start circulating from people. The Constabulary get called in, and the cycle of pointless, soul-crushing paranoid stupidity starts *again*. Even the threat of a lawsuit has been suggested at least once. Every opinion is a threat to be counteracted or suppressed, not an opportunity to get community feedback. Raise any doubt and you are accused of being an ‘obstructionist’. Raise any doubt and someone will try and work out what your secret RationalWiki codename is.[^1] It's like Marvin the Paranoid Android after a particularly [bad drug experience](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16413147) and an *X-Files* marathon. Not a productive work environment. Wikipedia and other projects have the principle of "assume good faith". It is often hard to live by. The Editorial Council seems to have the principle "assume everyone is an alien from a distant star system who, in proposing [some matter] is secretly trying to take over the process so they rape our children!" The whole process has become such a huge waste of time, and it has been at *the worst moment imaginable*. Citizendium has some real big problems that have bottled up over poor management, both editorial, financial and logistical. I've been complaining about the Healing Arts problem for months on end. I've been pointing out that we could do with changing the design for ages. And every time I've been told "oh, don't worry, once the charter is in place and we elect the Councils, we can resolve all these issues". And that is a load of bollocks. I'm on the fucking Council! Can I do anything about it now? Absolutely not. We've got to wait for something else first. And that something else is the spectacle of toddlers squabbling, then not allowing anyone to resolve their squabbling because it was done in a private e-mail or for seventeen other bureaucratic reasons. And for *what*? A wiki with 15,000 odd articles and a few hundred contributors at most? What was so funny about the Fire Discovery Subcommittee is that committees are a luxury you get once you have a society stable enough for them. Look at any successful open source project and you'll find few if any committees or Councils or quorums or any of that faff. That is a feature, not a bug. I'm not saying we don't need those things. But we don't need them *now*. What we need are sensible, mature people who can make a decision without drama and bickering. Such people exist, and they are leaving the project in droves. What are left are a few people hanging on to hope (and a fair bit of paranoia too) and a lot of bureaucracy trolls. While Wikipedia may go too far towards anarchy, Citizendium has gone too far towards bureaucracy way *too early*. Numerous times, I have suggested that we ought to make policies less heavy and less complicated, but reserve the right to increase the complexity as and when it is required. Take registration: it is far too complicated at the moment. I can see why, if we had about ten times the number of contributors, the current registration process might be justified. But we don't. We are struggling to recruit authors. So, you know, in any sane community, we'd lift the registration requirements to allow more people to sign up just a teeny bit until we reached a point where vandalism and other problems with a lack of real names became an issue then clamp it back down. But, no, when such ideas are suggested, certain people just get more fundamentalist about rules and procedure and less and less tolerant of disagreement. *This is not helping.* I have been putting off resigning for a long time. I've considered it numerous times in private e-mail with others. I like to think I'm one of the good guys. I've been trying my hardest to push Citizendium in the right direction. But personal disputes are too strong and our bureaucracy enables this self-destructive lunacy rather than discourages it. My only problem with resigning is that I will sadly be passing on the responsibility to someone else. I wish them luck: as I said, they will need it. There's plenty of people I respect in the Citizendium project. Though I (apparently) disagree[^2] with her on much, I got a lot of respect for the hard work Aleta Curry puts in. I've disagreed with – and been very rude to on occasion – Anthony Sebastian, but he's a good guy. Even more so with D. Matt Innis: we really disagree on alternative medicine, but he has always acted maturely and intelligently. Chris Key is a good guy. And Daniel Mietchen has been a pleasure to work with and to bounce ideas off: he is exactly the right person to be in charge of Citizendium. And I'm glad I've had an opportunity to work with people like Pat Palmer and some of the Eduzendium students. There's plenty more. I hope to continue working with some of the intelligent and incredibly helpful people in the Citizendium community who have been charitable with their time and wisdom. I am not a grudge-bearing type. I do not wish to destroy Citizendium, and nothing would please me more than if the site were to resolve its issues and become a viable project and do all the things it has set out to. I'd like to conclude by thanking everyone who voted for me in the elections. I am proud to have served the Citizendium community even though events outside of my control have made my continued presence on the council impossible to sustain. I have no intention of bringing Citizendium down: it is on a self-destructive path already and requires no outside assistance. I do hope that the problems which have plagued Citizendium for years now are resolved sensibly and maturely. I want to be wrong about Citizendium because, well, I'm personally invested in the project having contributed a lot of material to it. But I cannot endure any more drama or bullshit; I cannot be party to any more crazy paranoid accusations, any more secret e-mails, any more headaches. There comes a time when one has to say enough is enough. And for me, now is that time. I hope my words prompt people more enamoured with bureaucracy and personal infighting to put that to one side and do what is right. I wash my hands of the problem.[^4] Good luck everyone! [^1]: Yes, my questioning of the homeopathy situation has caused people to suggest that I have a secret account on RationalWiki with absolutely no evidence. I have a RationalWiki account: the username is 'Tom Morris'. But, Doctor Dark, you'll be pleased to know that I have been reliably informed that in at least one Citizendium user's paranoid fantasies, you and I are the same person. [^2]: I'm told I disagree with Aleta, although I cannot explain what I am supposed to disagree with her on as we have not had an actual chance to hash out our differences on anything of substance yet. But, as I said, I respect Aleta's hard work even if I am supposed to disagree with her or something. [^3]: I hope I can depart from the Council on good terms and still be a productive community member. If, as a result of my statements here, I find myself rapidly banned and condemned as a heretic (my own personal odds are about 40% on Constabulary action at the moment), you'll know that the tolerance for dissent from community members has been lost. Feel free to consider me a test case of whether Citizendium is too far up its own arse or not. [^4]: On a personal level, I will be able to spend more time programming, working on my research proposal and vegging out in front of the TV (gimme that dopamine hit!). This will be a much more useful use of my time than the Editorial Council. [^5]: Unfortunately, Citizendium may be more like GNU Hurd than like FreeBSD in this analogy...
Citizendium in Beta
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has finally taken Citizendium (a new & improved Wikipedia) into beta, but the question remains--will the experts follow?
Early this month, Vermont's Middlebury College banned Wikipedia citations in history papers after several students were found citing incorrect information. Because Wikipedia is user-generated, professors chastised the site for its inaccurate articles; however, with Wikipedia being one of the top ten most visited sites worldwide, the site is more than accessible regardless of whether or not the information is correct. So why start a new site? Why not just teach academics to edit articles?
Simple: vested interest
I could care less about Citizendium's policy to show users' real names. Let's look at their conflicts of interest. According to a Sci-Tech Today article, Forrester Research VP Josh Bernoff, noted that corporations are extremely frustrated with Wikipedia's policies. Said Bernoff, "Companies have had real challenges getting their perspective on the facts addressed in Wikipedia."
Well Josh, companies don't actually have perspectives- principals and stakeholders who are too lazy to write Wikipedia articles do. Perhaps you should learn to value consumer input OR at the very least, embrace a true democracy and write articles rather than building a series of online gatekeepers. Yes, professor, that's mud in your eye too.
Wikipedia is popular, REALLY popular, and whether or not traditional institutions want to believe it, this makes it relevant as a social meme. The real question is, if words like "meme" and "irregardless" can become normative simply via common usage and consensus, can inaccuracies become accurate over time? God I hope not.
In the 60's, famed Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan challenged Dr. Timothy Leary to come up with a memetic catch phrase. The result was, "turn on, tune in, drop out." My call to action is much less poignant. Directed to academics, progressives & anyone who has ever wanted a voice: THE REVOLUTION IS YOU. QUIT WHINING & GET TO WORK.
THE EVOLVING MEME: Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, started Conservapedia.com, a site he describes as "a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American." Given that hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia viewers and editors are neither Christian nor American, it's probably true that there is a partiality towards more secular beliefs including the infamous Flying Spaghetti Monster.