Everybody knows part of the problem with Wikipedia is the automated tools, that and the insane edit counts required by people who play it as a game with the idea of "leveling up" to admin.
Try to correct a date, for example, and watch it get reverted just so someone can add another reversion to their edit count. Lather, rinse, repeat. Good data is 99% likely to be reverted at this point, because the people operating "tools" like Huggle, Twinkle, Finkle, Fuckle, Whatever don't give two shits about checking to see whether an edit is good before they revert it - the fact that you spent 2 minutes checking to see whether it was good means 2 minutes that someone else could have gotten the revert for their "score", and if you don't revert it, you don't "score" anything. So all these mindless idiots do is revert, revert, revert.
Wikipedia's approach isn't even close to an "honest attempt", however. The methods by which their administrator clique treats outsiders are ridiculously jackbooted; organized groups have been able to get a few admins in place and then simply use them to run roughshod over anyone who comes in in good faith to try to repair the damage done by partisans taking over articles.
There was a kerfluffle a few years ago when an organized Arab group went nuts trying to remove the Hebrew translations of certain regional (common to both Israel, Syria, Lebanon, etc) dishes like Za'atar and Felafel. The end result was the bannings of anyone who tried to defend it, on behest of the organized crew. Just one example, but a common theme. When the various organized groups (the "Shi'a Guild", etc) who were organizing to POV various articles on wikipedia were told "not in public", they didn't vanish, they just moved to outside forums like soundvision.com and started organizing from there.
Or the time they altered the rules so that an administrator can call someone a "sockpuppet" at any time, and NO amount of proof - not even a "checkuser", because they changed the rules so that "checkuser" can ONLY establish guilt, not innnocence - can ever clear their name?
The phrase "honest attempt" should not be used in conjunction with Wikipedia. The whole way the system's set up is just corrupt, top to bottom.
I also wouldn't put it passed the Republican party in SC to want to insure that DeMint beats down a black Democratic candidate by a very large margin. That would give him plenty of angles to spin this as an anti-Obama victory.
You're insane, you know that? The Republicans spin the loss of a black Democrat candidate as an "anti-Obama victory", and all it does is charge up the racist black vote that turned up for Obama last time around based on nothing but skin color.
You didn't have to get at the disc yourself. The UMD drive scratched the hell out of them just fine for you in what $ony laughably called "normal wear and tear."
Considering that an original PSP gets a 33% battery life boost from running a game off of the SD card rather than the craptacular UMD drive? Or the fact that you can carry all 3 of the decent games for the console on one card, and never have to worry about swapping/scratching/losing the UMD's then?
who in their right mind would buy any game for the PSP anyways? I can count on one hand the number of good titles for it, and none released in the last 3 years qualify...
This kind of shit is par for the course today, and it's the reason it is hard to trust journalists these days. Most so-called reviews out there - especially larger sites - are essentially paid-for ads. It's a rare day that a bad game or bad product gets panned like it deserves, because the editors are always worried about (a) the company pulling their ad dollars, (b) the company pulling product support away, or (c) the company launching some frivolous lawsuit just to burn up cash.
Remember the Kane & Lynch Eidos/Gamespot fiasco? Ever watched Farhad Manjoo at Slate change his tune to whatever Apple/Google want him to say on a given day, even if they were saying the opposite last week?
How about Rockstar's bullshit recently at a reviewer who didn't like Red Dead Redemption? I wonder how many people Rockstar paid off to get the "critical acclaim" for their boring western sandbox... er litterbox gameplay.
Countering your bullshit and lies would take far more time than I have right now.
Your claims regarding Arab vs non-Arab Israelis are simply false, for a start.
As for the "Israeli Settler", I refer you to the hatred the ARAB WORLD has for the Palestinians - it was the ARAB forces who stole the "palestinian" territories in 1948 and stuffed them into refugee camps, for starters. Take a look at a map sometime: every iota of what is claimed to be the "west bank" or "gaza" today, was controlled by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, or Syria after the 1948 war. And yet, instead of FOLLOWING INTERNATIONAL LAW and making the Arab inhabitants citizens, they instead put forward the lie of "occupied Palestine" which needed to be "liberated."
What they really meant was the Hamas motto, "drive the jews into the sea in a river of blood." However, the lie of "liberating occupied palestine" plays better to cameras and to clueless idiots who lack the brain cells necessary to so much as read a map.
I'm not going to say the Palestinians haven't been abused. But if you want to see who has been doing the abusing, the first place you need to look is THEIR FELLOW ARABS.
Another point: who was the first to put up a fence on Gaza? Subtle hint, it wasn't Israel. I'll let you do the research yourself...
Yawn. No matter which age you claim he committed the act at - 6,9,or 10 depending on which Muslim scholar you ask - Mohammed committed an act of pedophilia in his "marriage" to Aisha.
He also irreparably harmed the rights of women in the region. Before him, women owned and ran businesses. Remember that his first wife owned her own business (which admittedly she had inherited when her first husband died) and picked Mo up as a boytoy, kinda like Demi Moore marrying Ashton Kutcher.
I have done more study on Islam than you have, of that I'm certain.
As regards San Francisco... you've never been there, have you?
After watching the coverage of the Israel/Gaza situation and the Terror Flotilla this weekend... it definitely makes people dumber.
There is no sense of scale and no memory of past events any more. In January 2009, the UN security council passed a resolution calling for ALL nations to step up efforts to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons into Gaza. The sum total of responsibility for this, sadly, was passed on to Egypt and Israel, who dutifully stepped up their blockades and inspections (Egypt actually closed Rafah ENTIRELY, which made Israel the de-facto only option for transferring aid in).
Likewise, millions of nincompoops with no clue about actual international law hear a bunch of people screaming about how the interdiction took place in so-called "international waters", notwithstanding every precedent (from the Council of Paris through the Geneva Conventions and onwards) explicitly saying that a blockade-running ship may be apprehended outside territorial waters, ESPECIALLY if they are publicly announcing their intent to run the blockade.
It seems that the collective memory of the world lasts only a few days, and then past events are forgotten, while the lies of violent terrorist front groups like the IHH are accepted as "facts" by so-called "journalists" who do absolutely zero research and are nothing but doorstop-IQ losers who parrot whatever they are told.
Easy to answer - RICE GOT EXPENSIVE. Time was, rice was cheap and plentiful, so people threw rice. After the expansion of the corn lobby in the USA, a lot of farmers (many in areas that are shit-stupid to grow corn in) switched over to corn, and so there was a lot less rice available. Price went up for rice, price went down (thanks to wasteful subsidy $$$$ for way too fucking much corn than we can properly use), and people went looking for an alternative to toss at weddings. That's also when the stoners came up with the idea of using soap bubble wands...
Try 1/5 the speed for the same fucking price. DSL company has the phone lines, Comcrap has the cable lines. In about 40% of my county, Comcrap is the only option, in another 40% American Titty Twister is the only option, and in the final 20% they both charge the same outrageous monopoly prices and claim to be "competing" with each other.
Why is it that showing pictures of a 7th-century pedophile who started a death cult is somehow "offensive"? The whole fucking religion is OFFENSIVE to anyone sane anyways...
What you fail to consider is the amount of overhead "keepalive" traffic. You get charged for all of that, too. Oh, and I hope you aren't trying to telecommute...
Nope. They're charging per-reciever in my city. Comcrap doesn't give shit out for free - there's a rental charge for every TV receiver box, every cablecard, even a rental charge for the damn cable modem.
First, when they came out to do my install, I was getting a crappy-as-hell signal. Their techs sat around scratching their asses for three hours, and eventually (only after I'd been on the phone with a supervisor behind their backs) finally went out to check the routing equipment, only to find that some ass-tard had simply shoved shit together any which way out there and had broken the lead on the connection going to my house. Elapsed time before they got that fixed: 7 days later.
Then they started rolling every goddamn thing into the "digital only" package. "Doesn't cost any more" except that you have to rent a specialized fucking receiver for each goddamn room you want it in, or if you want to actually use the CableCard function built into your TV, they actually charge you MORE to rent the fucking cablecard.
Then we get to the network crap.
I had three machines; one recently rebuilt, one laptop, one old machine I use for video-to-TV playback.
Video-to-TV box and laptop are configured to OpenDNS. They worked the moment I wired in. Upstairs box, newly rebuilt, started getting Comcrap's "we hijack your traffic" crap-DNS info, kept trying to make me go through a fuck-ton of meaningless registration crap and "please sign up for a comcast.net email" (don't need or want yet another fucking email address) before crashing both IE and Firefox (supposedly they were "in the middle of updating it" for multiple days).
Took me 3 phone calls. On the third call, after calling bullshit on their "well they must be working on it" lie, it then took 4 hours and 2 levels of jumping up and down screaming "just give me your supervisor or someone who goddamn knows what they are doing" to get the goddamn thing cleared. Went through afterwards, said "fuck you" to their DNS servers, and set both the final box and my router itself to use OpenDNS instead.
Every time I have a service issue, I wind up calling them, and some retard in "customer service" insists "well the tool says your cable modem is fine" (bullshit, both cable TV and internet service are down completely, and yes I already went through your ENTIRE TROUBLESHOOTING METHOD you fucking dingbat, it happens frequently enough that I have the goddamn process memorized after all). Then I insist they pass me to a supervisor, who half the time is a complete ass who's mad I took him away from playing his fucking facebook games, and the other half the time admits that yeah, there is either a "scheduled maintenance outage" (which they never inform us of AHEAD of time) or a problem at the local routing station... which they are too fucking lazy to inform the level-1's about.
The only reason I'm on comcrap at all is that my alternatives in the area are crap. AT&T DSL in my area gets maybe 0.5 Mbit down, if that. Verizon FiOS is a mile away but keeps saying that because they don't "own the lines" in my subdivision, they aren't allowed to offer service. Functionally, Comcrap is a goddamn monopoly, and it shows.
1: current automatic copyright system but only for a very limited time, say less than a year. 2: if you want longer protection you have to register it by giving a full clean, unencrypted copy to something like the british library- a legal deposit library, it receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom.
I'm ambivalent on the first (it gives a fair amount of time within to properly register), and very happy with the idea of the second. Being required to hand over a clean, high quality unencrypted copy for public availability once the copyright term expires should indeed be a part of the system.
deciding X isn't exactly easy- if you spend 20 years writing an incredible authoritative book on some subject why should you only get paid for 5 years? Current patent term is good for 20 years from filing or 17 years from issuance, whichever is later, in the US. So under your theoretical option, you'd get 20 years after date of registration (technically you could get nearly 21 if you used your 1-year "grace period" proposed above).
should terry Pratchett no longer get royalties on the first 25 discworld books because they were published more than 10 years ago? For the books published over TWENTY years ago, I'd say no. He's had 20 years worth of royalties already.
Should not have control of the characters in his current books because they first appeared in his books more than 20 years ago? That would be the idea. Part of the stupidity of our current bought-and-paid-for corrupt system is that the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, which by constitutional precedent regarding ex-post-facto law (and absent someone paying off someone over and over... wonder how many SC Justices just happen to hold Disney stock?) should have passed into the public domain in 1956 (under the 28-year term from its original date of publication) and somehow still hasn't today!
Obligatory "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin..." reference.
As for the rest, well, we'll see. Copyright law all over the world is fucked up right now; the original idea, the contract that someone would have exclusive rights to their story so as to make money for a certain time, before being required to give it up for others to be inspired by (since they used the language and ideas of the commons and doubtless had their own inspirations from there), is all but lost. We've already reached the point where many works have died, never to be seen again, simply because some shithead stuck (for instance) the degrading original film negatives into a vault to become unusable while there were no other copies around.
Ideally, copyright terms should last no longer than patent terms, and registration should be mandatory before copyright can be enforced. Our current "everything is copyrighted by default including my fucking grocery list if I claim it's really a poem" regime is unsustainable and worthless.
From what I understand, Austin is barely part of TX - it's more like someone took a scraping from the Left Coast, say around San Francisco (the city full of gay) and dropped it onto a spot in the middle of nowhere semi-central to TX...
Petty power - like that wielded by network executives, local police officers, the clerks at your local DMV, and wikipedia administrators - corrupts immensely out of all proportion to the actual power.
You're REALLY suggesting wikipedia as a good model? I am shocked and appalled. The last thing one wants to do is contract an insane asylum to write textbooks.
Then again, this was a kdawson piece, which explains the crazed left-wing "the sky is falling" slant on everything...
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody knows part of the problem with Wikipedia is the automated tools, that and the insane edit counts required by people who play it as a game with the idea of "leveling up" to admin.
Try to correct a date, for example, and watch it get reverted just so someone can add another reversion to their edit count. Lather, rinse, repeat. Good data is 99% likely to be reverted at this point, because the people operating "tools" like Huggle, Twinkle, Finkle, Fuckle, Whatever don't give two shits about checking to see whether an edit is good before they revert it - the fact that you spent 2 minutes checking to see whether it was good means 2 minutes that someone else could have gotten the revert for their "score", and if you don't revert it, you don't "score" anything. So all these mindless idiots do is revert, revert, revert.
Wikipedia's approach isn't even close to an "honest attempt", however. The methods by which their administrator clique treats outsiders are ridiculously jackbooted; organized groups have been able to get a few admins in place and then simply use them to run roughshod over anyone who comes in in good faith to try to repair the damage done by partisans taking over articles.
There was a kerfluffle a few years ago when an organized Arab group went nuts trying to remove the Hebrew translations of certain regional (common to both Israel, Syria, Lebanon, etc) dishes like Za'atar and Felafel. The end result was the bannings of anyone who tried to defend it, on behest of the organized crew. Just one example, but a common theme. When the various organized groups (the "Shi'a Guild", etc) who were organizing to POV various articles on wikipedia were told "not in public", they didn't vanish, they just moved to outside forums like soundvision.com and started organizing from there.
And who can forget the various scandals like the Durova's Hit-List Scandal?
Or the time they altered the rules so that an administrator can call someone a "sockpuppet" at any time, and NO amount of proof - not even a "checkuser", because they changed the rules so that "checkuser" can ONLY establish guilt, not innnocence - can ever clear their name?
The phrase "honest attempt" should not be used in conjunction with Wikipedia. The whole way the system's set up is just corrupt, top to bottom.
I also wouldn't put it passed the Republican party in SC to want to insure that DeMint beats down a black Democratic candidate by a very large margin. That would give him plenty of angles to spin this as an anti-Obama victory.
You're insane, you know that? The Republicans spin the loss of a black Democrat candidate as an "anti-Obama victory", and all it does is charge up the racist black vote that turned up for Obama last time around based on nothing but skin color.
You didn't have to get at the disc yourself. The UMD drive scratched the hell out of them just fine for you in what $ony laughably called "normal wear and tear."
Considering that an original PSP gets a 33% battery life boost from running a game off of the SD card rather than the craptacular UMD drive? Or the fact that you can carry all 3 of the decent games for the console on one card, and never have to worry about swapping/scratching/losing the UMD's then?
I think you're underestimating #3.
The thought occurs:
who in their right mind would buy any game for the PSP anyways? I can count on one hand the number of good titles for it, and none released in the last 3 years qualify...
I hope you were joking.
This kind of shit is par for the course today, and it's the reason it is hard to trust journalists these days. Most so-called reviews out there - especially larger sites - are essentially paid-for ads. It's a rare day that a bad game or bad product gets panned like it deserves, because the editors are always worried about (a) the company pulling their ad dollars, (b) the company pulling product support away, or (c) the company launching some frivolous lawsuit just to burn up cash.
Remember the Kane & Lynch Eidos/Gamespot fiasco? Ever watched Farhad Manjoo at Slate change his tune to whatever Apple/Google want him to say on a given day, even if they were saying the opposite last week?
How about Rockstar's bullshit recently at a reviewer who didn't like Red Dead Redemption? I wonder how many people Rockstar paid off to get the "critical acclaim" for their boring western sandbox... er litterbox gameplay.
I judge Islam by the same standards I judge Branch Davidians, Moonies, $cientologists, or any other fucked-up insane cult.
Countering your bullshit and lies would take far more time than I have right now.
Your claims regarding Arab vs non-Arab Israelis are simply false, for a start.
As for the "Israeli Settler", I refer you to the hatred the ARAB WORLD has for the Palestinians - it was the ARAB forces who stole the "palestinian" territories in 1948 and stuffed them into refugee camps, for starters. Take a look at a map sometime: every iota of what is claimed to be the "west bank" or "gaza" today, was controlled by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, or Syria after the 1948 war. And yet, instead of FOLLOWING INTERNATIONAL LAW and making the Arab inhabitants citizens, they instead put forward the lie of "occupied Palestine" which needed to be "liberated."
What they really meant was the Hamas motto, "drive the jews into the sea in a river of blood." However, the lie of "liberating occupied palestine" plays better to cameras and to clueless idiots who lack the brain cells necessary to so much as read a map.
I'm not going to say the Palestinians haven't been abused. But if you want to see who has been doing the abusing, the first place you need to look is THEIR FELLOW ARABS.
Another point: who was the first to put up a fence on Gaza? Subtle hint, it wasn't Israel. I'll let you do the research yourself...
Yawn. No matter which age you claim he committed the act at - 6,9,or 10 depending on which Muslim scholar you ask - Mohammed committed an act of pedophilia in his "marriage" to Aisha.
He also irreparably harmed the rights of women in the region. Before him, women owned and ran businesses. Remember that his first wife owned her own business (which admittedly she had inherited when her first husband died) and picked Mo up as a boytoy, kinda like Demi Moore marrying Ashton Kutcher.
I have done more study on Islam than you have, of that I'm certain.
As regards San Francisco... you've never been there, have you?
After watching the coverage of the Israel/Gaza situation and the Terror Flotilla this weekend... it definitely makes people dumber.
There is no sense of scale and no memory of past events any more. In January 2009, the UN security council passed a resolution calling for ALL nations to step up efforts to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons into Gaza. The sum total of responsibility for this, sadly, was passed on to Egypt and Israel, who dutifully stepped up their blockades and inspections (Egypt actually closed Rafah ENTIRELY, which made Israel the de-facto only option for transferring aid in).
Likewise, millions of nincompoops with no clue about actual international law hear a bunch of people screaming about how the interdiction took place in so-called "international waters", notwithstanding every precedent (from the Council of Paris through the Geneva Conventions and onwards) explicitly saying that a blockade-running ship may be apprehended outside territorial waters, ESPECIALLY if they are publicly announcing their intent to run the blockade.
It seems that the collective memory of the world lasts only a few days, and then past events are forgotten, while the lies of violent terrorist front groups like the IHH are accepted as "facts" by so-called "journalists" who do absolutely zero research and are nothing but doorstop-IQ losers who parrot whatever they are told.
Easy to answer - RICE GOT EXPENSIVE. Time was, rice was cheap and plentiful, so people threw rice. After the expansion of the corn lobby in the USA, a lot of farmers (many in areas that are shit-stupid to grow corn in) switched over to corn, and so there was a lot less rice available. Price went up for rice, price went down (thanks to wasteful subsidy $$$$ for way too fucking much corn than we can properly use), and people went looking for an alternative to toss at weddings. That's also when the stoners came up with the idea of using soap bubble wands...
Try 1/5 the speed for the same fucking price. DSL company has the phone lines, Comcrap has the cable lines. In about 40% of my county, Comcrap is the only option, in another 40% American Titty Twister is the only option, and in the final 20% they both charge the same outrageous monopoly prices and claim to be "competing" with each other.
Nope! Nearest possible alternative is DSL at 1/5 or less the speed.
Look at Comcrap in SE Texas to understand the terms "shit service" and "price gouging" as one good example...
Why is it that showing pictures of a 7th-century pedophile who started a death cult is somehow "offensive"? The whole fucking religion is OFFENSIVE to anyone sane anyways...
What you fail to consider is the amount of overhead "keepalive" traffic. You get charged for all of that, too. Oh, and I hope you aren't trying to telecommute...
Nope. They're charging per-reciever in my city. Comcrap doesn't give shit out for free - there's a rental charge for every TV receiver box, every cablecard, even a rental charge for the damn cable modem.
Sure, but they allow you to turn it off if you want.
Very similar issues with Comcrap.
First, when they came out to do my install, I was getting a crappy-as-hell signal. Their techs sat around scratching their asses for three hours, and eventually (only after I'd been on the phone with a supervisor behind their backs) finally went out to check the routing equipment, only to find that some ass-tard had simply shoved shit together any which way out there and had broken the lead on the connection going to my house. Elapsed time before they got that fixed: 7 days later.
Then they started rolling every goddamn thing into the "digital only" package. "Doesn't cost any more" except that you have to rent a specialized fucking receiver for each goddamn room you want it in, or if you want to actually use the CableCard function built into your TV, they actually charge you MORE to rent the fucking cablecard.
Then we get to the network crap.
I had three machines; one recently rebuilt, one laptop, one old machine I use for video-to-TV playback.
Video-to-TV box and laptop are configured to OpenDNS. They worked the moment I wired in. Upstairs box, newly rebuilt, started getting Comcrap's "we hijack your traffic" crap-DNS info, kept trying to make me go through a fuck-ton of meaningless registration crap and "please sign up for a comcast.net email" (don't need or want yet another fucking email address) before crashing both IE and Firefox (supposedly they were "in the middle of updating it" for multiple days).
Took me 3 phone calls. On the third call, after calling bullshit on their "well they must be working on it" lie, it then took 4 hours and 2 levels of jumping up and down screaming "just give me your supervisor or someone who goddamn knows what they are doing" to get the goddamn thing cleared. Went through afterwards, said "fuck you" to their DNS servers, and set both the final box and my router itself to use OpenDNS instead.
Every time I have a service issue, I wind up calling them, and some retard in "customer service" insists "well the tool says your cable modem is fine" (bullshit, both cable TV and internet service are down completely, and yes I already went through your ENTIRE TROUBLESHOOTING METHOD you fucking dingbat, it happens frequently enough that I have the goddamn process memorized after all). Then I insist they pass me to a supervisor, who half the time is a complete ass who's mad I took him away from playing his fucking facebook games, and the other half the time admits that yeah, there is either a "scheduled maintenance outage" (which they never inform us of AHEAD of time) or a problem at the local routing station... which they are too fucking lazy to inform the level-1's about.
The only reason I'm on comcrap at all is that my alternatives in the area are crap. AT&T DSL in my area gets maybe 0.5 Mbit down, if that. Verizon FiOS is a mile away but keeps saying that because they don't "own the lines" in my subdivision, they aren't allowed to offer service. Functionally, Comcrap is a goddamn monopoly, and it shows.
How about
1: current automatic copyright system but only for a very limited time, say less than a year.
2: if you want longer protection you have to register it by giving a full clean, unencrypted copy to something like the british library- a legal deposit library, it receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom.
I'm ambivalent on the first (it gives a fair amount of time within to properly register), and very happy with the idea of the second. Being required to hand over a clean, high quality unencrypted copy for public availability once the copyright term expires should indeed be a part of the system.
deciding X isn't exactly easy- if you spend 20 years writing an incredible authoritative book on some subject why should you only get paid for 5 years?
Current patent term is good for 20 years from filing or 17 years from issuance, whichever is later, in the US. So under your theoretical option, you'd get 20 years after date of registration (technically you could get nearly 21 if you used your 1-year "grace period" proposed above).
should terry Pratchett no longer get royalties on the first 25 discworld books because they were published more than 10 years ago?
For the books published over TWENTY years ago, I'd say no. He's had 20 years worth of royalties already.
Should not have control of the characters in his current books because they first appeared in his books more than 20 years ago?
That would be the idea. Part of the stupidity of our current bought-and-paid-for corrupt system is that the earliest version of Mickey Mouse, which by constitutional precedent regarding ex-post-facto law (and absent someone paying off someone over and over... wonder how many SC Justices just happen to hold Disney stock?) should have passed into the public domain in 1956 (under the 28-year term from its original date of publication) and somehow still hasn't today!
Obligatory "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin..." reference.
As for the rest, well, we'll see. Copyright law all over the world is fucked up right now; the original idea, the contract that someone would have exclusive rights to their story so as to make money for a certain time, before being required to give it up for others to be inspired by (since they used the language and ideas of the commons and doubtless had their own inspirations from there), is all but lost. We've already reached the point where many works have died, never to be seen again, simply because some shithead stuck (for instance) the degrading original film negatives into a vault to become unusable while there were no other copies around.
Ideally, copyright terms should last no longer than patent terms, and registration should be mandatory before copyright can be enforced. Our current "everything is copyrighted by default including my fucking grocery list if I claim it's really a poem" regime is unsustainable and worthless.
From what I understand, Austin is barely part of TX - it's more like someone took a scraping from the Left Coast, say around San Francisco (the city full of gay) and dropped it onto a spot in the middle of nowhere semi-central to TX...
Petty power - like that wielded by network executives, local police officers, the clerks at your local DMV, and wikipedia administrators - corrupts immensely out of all proportion to the actual power.
You're REALLY suggesting wikipedia as a good model? I am shocked and appalled. The last thing one wants to do is contract an insane asylum to write textbooks.
Then again, this was a kdawson piece, which explains the crazed left-wing "the sky is falling" slant on everything...