But go ahead an ignore them. You have shown an impressive capacity to ignore dismiss, and diminish evidence you don't like:
Me and many of the others in the Webcomics Slashdot story - People with hurt feelings, laziness and complacence.
Andrew Lih , an administrator, someone who has made his career studying media and is writing a book on Wikipedia - I was never highly impressed with Fuzheado's credentials as an administrator"
And now a founder, Jimbo Whales - He's more of a financier and public figurehead, and doesn't keep terribly in the loop
Someone needs to give you a job in the Bush administration.
Maybe if I wrote a book you'd take me seriously too? Nah, I don't agree with your pre-existing bias. The fact is, Fuzheado was never a heavily-involved admin as far as I could tell, and Jimbo has never been terribly active or in the loop as far as I could tell. Jimbo rules Wikipedia by a policy of salutary neglect and everyone in the project knows it. You're only betraying your own militant ignorance.
So I guess you've simply been a troll, with no investment in anything, gone from Wikipedia, "hardly contributes anymore and barely cares about the issue" and has too much time on his hands. OK, you got me. You can have the last word.
I was simply looking to provide another viewpoint, and to explain some things I've seen in my experience. You're the one who turned this into a combative flamewar, and for that, go fuck your mother in hell.
Why is it that in every damn RTS game you have this stupid mission where you have to take a bunch of your critters through a lenghty, winding corridor? Is there anyone who really enjoys those missions? Nobody I talked to does. Everyone wanted to play RTS games to harvest resources, spend them on an army and drown the enemy in a mass battle. Does anyone really like those "I have only 10 infantery men and need to bring them home safe" missions?
I actually enjoy those more than the resource gathering ones, categorically. But I'm more of a "real-time tactical" player anyway. I'm still hoping and waiting for a successor to Myth.
Spirituality is a totally separate question of human experience that has no place here. The question is a valid philosophical question--and while God is a possible answer, there's a difference between the God that philosophers speak of and the God of any given religion. The notion that God is the source of the laws of nature is perfectly consistent with deism--the idea that God created the universe and followed a policy of salutary neglect afterwards.
We're a few steps beyond that now. If you like, we can say that nature follows a few recognizable patterns we are able to express. The question is: why does it follow those patterns, or any pattern at all?
As I said, I don't expect a social studies teacher to know the ramifications of a diesel, gasoline, or propane powered bus (they have those here) before they take the class on a field trip.
No, but they should know that both gasoline and diesel exist, just as this teacher should have been able to either know that Firefox was a web browser, or to tell that it was when shown.
The laws we have already, or the laws we will end up with? If there was a convincing argument that the present laws of physics are the only ones logically possible, I'm sure we would have heard about it. As it stands, "mysterious logic we don't have yet" is a conjecture, not an argument. And the conjecture is more plausible if we assume we're not finished getting the laws down.
And imagining them is somewhat like asking whether God can make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, or imagining being your own grandfather via a time-travel machine: a mere exercise in word-play, allowed only by the fact that English is a sufficiently illogical and ambiguous way of communicating that all kinds of nonsense can be put into words and "make sense" grammatically without making the least bit of sense logically.
Being your own grandfather is just predestination, there's no paradox there. Killing your own grandfather is more of a paradox. Anyway, on the language front, that's a pretty well-known and established viewpoint in the philosophy of language.
and because at any second someone could hit Ctrl-C and kill us all instantly, erasing our entire life's work, because the whole of human existance could be some process running in the background of a lab workstation, because someone would be watching us... because someone would be responsible for human suffering.
Sounds like your problem is with God, not with simulations. I've read Bostrom's original paper where he gives the simulation argument, and he actually mentions this: if we are living in a simulation, then the simulation probably includes false memories from before the simulation began to run. What if there is in fact no suffering in the world, and all our memories of suffering are just illusions? Bostrom calls this a "far-fetched solution to the problem of evil".
Maybe it wouldn't make any difference to an animal, but I have psychological investment in the existential.
Existential is the same either way. Just because it's a computer simulation doesn't mean it's not real.
Well, if this is a simulation then this era is obviously of interest to someone, and therefore we should expect more interesting things to happen. Also we should do interesting things so they keep the simulation running. Maybe if we're interesting enough as individuals than the person running the simulation will be pleased with us and will choose to use us in his next simulation.
And what relevance do these experiences have to me other than how they manifest in the application deletions. Are you saying their viewpoint is screwed up because they deal with so much crap everyday that a lot of good content is deleted and they can't see that? Are you apologizing for them? If not, then why does this even need mentioning.
I'm explaining the issue in hopes of fostering understanding. It's not a direct counterargument and it never has been.
It has nothing to do about my reading comprehension. It has to do with you being a liar. To quote from earlier:
I simply will no longer donate time or money to Wikipedia and discourage others from doing so by warning them of what happens to their contributions.Please do, if it will stem the crapflood Wikipedia has to deal with already.
You might not have noticed a little word there: "if". You might consider whether or not your contributions, or those of your friends, are really even needed or welcome, and if you don't think they will be, I urge you to carry on in encouraging them not to offer them. Again the point about reading comprehension.
And in my opinion, many good contributors are leaving because they don't want to deal with what the debates have become(accusations of sock puppetry, self promotion, etc.) for content that is, in my opinion, good and shouldn't have to be defended in terms of notability. No need to respond to this. Your experience makes you disagree.
Good contributors leaving is a problem Wikipedia does have. I'm one of them. But to me a good contributor is someone who's proven themselves, and such a person will always have their opinion considered at AFD. If you want to talk about unproven contributors who might have become good, AFD is a small part of the puzzle there--Wikipedia is too insular for its own good.
That in no way changes my point that one of the founders of the project who, certainly, in his mind retains the vision of what he felt this project was, felt anger over deletionist policy when he was hit. This means the oldest of the old timers sees how things have changed and doesn't like it to the point of saying to the deletionists they should, "excuse themselves from the project and find a new hobby."
Actually, I went and read that remark in its full context, and he wasn't angry at deletionists for being deletionists. His full remark was as follows: "You can dispute the article on the merits of the notability (though not successfully, I think), but the assumptions of bad faith in this argument are just shocking. Some people should excuse themselves from the project and find a new hobby." So there it is--incivility out, good-faith concerns about notability in. The same policy we've always had.
Since I feel the voting process has been corrupted, with include votes cast aside and ballot stuffing the other way, I no longer have faith that the spirit of this principal is being applied. Now, I do think this is true the majority of the time, but I also think corrupt voting now happens to an extent that it has become a problem. And to save us some time, this is my belief and not true in your experience.
You could substantiate your opinion here with some examples. But that's too good for you. Rather wallow in ignorance I gather.
The talk pages are where people who have some interest in the topic are. Attracting contributors is the equivalent, to me, of attracting the "outsiders" even more so than occasional readers who don't have high edit counts. And since I believe AFD has been corrupted, this more likely than not means gathering deletionists and stuffing the ballots in their favor. Yeah, I know you disagree.
It's recently (as of 2007 or so) become standard practice to personally notify the creator of a page that's put up for deletion so they can say their piece. (Most such pages are rather new).
So you're saying either that it wasn't Al-Qaeda that attacked the WTC (who was it then? Jewish Neocon Freemasons?), or that Al-Qaeda was not based in Afghanistan. Sorry, I don't have time to joust with nutjobs this week.
I'm all for Wikipedia retaining proofs. I'd gladly see every single Pokemon article, for instance, deleted and replaced with a mathematical proof. But we don't have to make that choice yet, since Wikipedia has plenty of hard drive space and they can afford more.
Again the apology for ignorance. A teacher who assigns work that requires internet research should be able to know what's what, just as a teacher who assigns work that requires calculators should be able to tell a calculator from a gameboy.
I firmly believe schools need more discipline, not less. Students refusing to abide by a reasonable request from the teacher should get detention.
(1) Using IE instead of Firefox isn't a reasonable request. It's a request borne out of ignorance. (2) Discipline is a virtue--it's not the same thing as arbitrary authoritarianism. The "obey the rules blindly even when they're ad hoc requests from someone completely ignorant of the matter at hand" form of discipline is unfitting a free people.
...As far as I can tell, Bush only lied us into war once, in Iraq. The only other war was Afghanistan. Did you think 9/11 was faked somehow? Or that the idea (also held by the Clinton administration) that al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan was a lie?
Does Article II also empower the president to waterboard me, hook fake electrodes to my balls, or tase me? Or does it simply extend to listening to me having phone sex with my girlfriend while she's overseas?
FWIW, in case you didn't notice, this thing was a hoax.
Sure, but it makes a good conversation topic anyway--surely it's something that obviously could happen in our school system, and either way the value is in the discussion.
They should not be expected to be an expert on all things technology when that is not the subject they teach. What if the kid had been using Opera? What if the kid had been using iCab? How about NXS Mosaic? How about some spyware/adware laden browser shell?
The teacher should have noticed that the software in question was, in fact, displaying web pages and that the program was, in fact, a web browser.
The student was provided with a perfectly adequate tool to do the job, there is NO REASON that he could not use the requested browser, and refusing to do so was lipping off to the teacher, and preventing the class from moving forward.
There's no reason he should be prevented from using Firefox. If I'm in a math class and I want to use my HP calculator instead of the TI's they hand out, the teacher shouldn't respond by saying "that's not a calculator, it must be a gameboy or a hacking device, stop using it or you will go to detention." Responding that way only illustrates his ignorance. And we aren't dealing with anything as exotic as postfix notation here, just a different web browser that works fundamentally the same way.
If you're going to assign students to do web research, evidently you're supposed to be teaching them to use web research, and thus the internet is at the very least a background or prerequisite topic that the teacher should be conversant in.
Since I'm not defending "the company shill, the teenagers screwing around, the garage band," I don't need it explained to me why some things get deleted.
I'm not explaining to you why some things get deleted, you illiterate prick. I'm explaining the formative experiences of "asshole deletionists"--the experiences that form Wikipedia editors into that given viewpoint on the project.
And how about the "crapflood" accusation. That uncivil statement was unquestionably directed at me.
Given that it's taken three incidences of repeating myself to explain the above point to you, you're probably not at the level of reading comprehension for me to attempt any further clarification. Please tell me English isn't your native language.
Here is one where a lot of keep votes were accused to be socks. As I say, I haven't spent my time forming alliances, so I cannot vouch for them. But a lot of keep votes were definitely tossed pretty easily. See more in comment below.
That one seems a little borderline, but the opinions of well-experienced veterans definitely count for more in AFD discussions for reasons I've already outlined to you.
In terms of outsiders at Wikipedia, I guess it depends on what you consider an outsider. Someone who reads and is a fan of a webcomic but doesn't edit may be considered an outsider to you, but if he is a unique individual that has an interest in the topic, I think his vote and arguments should be counted. And this is setting aside all my feelings about how many content creators have no interest in politiking and bureucracy, while the deletionist do. So insider inclusionist policy is under represented. Maybe that means too bad for them. Anyway, I'll skip this tangent for now.
In my experience, a lot of people who are very committed to keeping their work in Wikipedia are very ardent in these deletion discussions--although I can see how many overwhelmed newcomers may be far less persistent.
One example which you have consistently ignored is the speedy delete for the article Mzoli's Meats. Since Jimbo has been around since the beginning, and his reaction to the delete was surprise and some anger, I would say you know a lot less about the rules than you think.
I think the skepticism over that article was reasonable and largely in good faith, though the way it was communicated may not have been. The main issue there was a lack of reliable sources, which goes to the reliability and accuracy of the article. Incidentally, Jimbo hasn't actively involved himself with editing or adminship since 2003 or so. He's more of a financier and public figurehead, and doesn't keep terribly in the loop.
I want the burden back on the deletionist to justify their actions rather than the inclusionist.
It is--no consensus defaults to keep.
So these two example articles would have the debate on the talk pages, and only after extensive discussion could it be nominated for deletion.
Talk pages are rarely trafficked--the purpose of AFD is to attract the attention of more contributors to the discussion.
At the current state, one has to spend one's time in energy wasting debates, having to constantly be aware of deletion nominations, needing to form alliances with admins to keep your work, all rather than creating content.
Honestly, the politicking doesn't stop there--and if you have solid content to contribute, it rarely starts there. One reason it puzzles me to see people fixate on this issue is that there are so many worse problems with Wikipedia that influence our important content--whining about our treatment of content that falls between local high schools and individual Star Trek episodes on one end and vanity pages on the other is a minor concern in comparison, even if it is as bad as you think it is. (What could possibly be more important, you might wonder? Issues like systemic bias, agenda-pushing communists, politicking taking precedence over substance, quality rot, relative disinterest in unglamorous work, and community growth happening faster than community learning.)
Hello, I am [NAME], SGT, USA at Guantanamo Bay, and I believe this article is factually incorrect; I would like to clarify that Fidel Castro is an admitted transsexual. If any further information is necessary, please feel free to contact the Army's Public Affairs division at [E-MAIL & SNAIL-MAIL ADDRESSES].
There's a difference between corporate environments--where centralized network computing makes sense--and the home environment. Because with the home environment comes an important question--where do you keep naked pictures of your girlfriend? I'm not being facetious--privacy is an issue, and I would prefer that the contents of my hard drive (IM transcripts, personal diaries, bank account information, etc.) were not available online.
That's not leveraging a desktop monopoly--that's leveraging a pile of cash. IE is a better example of leveraging a desktop monopoly--get everyone to use your browser by including it with your OS, ensure that your browser supports a non-standard version of HTML and a new technology called ActiveX, and use that to sell more copies of FrontPage and IIS. What MS did with the Xbox is the same thing Sony did with the PlayStation, or Apple did with the iPod--use an existing pile of money from one business to enter another business, hoping to find some money in it. Microsoft just has a bigger pile of cash than most.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if I wrote a book you'd take me seriously too? Nah, I don't agree with your pre-existing bias. The fact is, Fuzheado was never a heavily-involved admin as far as I could tell, and Jimbo has never been terribly active or in the loop as far as I could tell. Jimbo rules Wikipedia by a policy of salutary neglect and everyone in the project knows it. You're only betraying your own militant ignorance.
So I guess you've simply been a troll, with no investment in anything, gone from Wikipedia, "hardly contributes anymore and barely cares about the issue" and has too much time on his hands. OK, you got me. You can have the last word.I was simply looking to provide another viewpoint, and to explain some things I've seen in my experience. You're the one who turned this into a combative flamewar, and for that, go fuck your mother in hell.
I actually enjoy those more than the resource gathering ones, categorically. But I'm more of a "real-time tactical" player anyway. I'm still hoping and waiting for a successor to Myth.
That's a straw man fallacy and we both know it. The real question is: why does nature follow predictable patterns?
Spirituality is a totally separate question of human experience that has no place here. The question is a valid philosophical question--and while God is a possible answer, there's a difference between the God that philosophers speak of and the God of any given religion. The notion that God is the source of the laws of nature is perfectly consistent with deism--the idea that God created the universe and followed a policy of salutary neglect afterwards.
We're a few steps beyond that now. If you like, we can say that nature follows a few recognizable patterns we are able to express. The question is: why does it follow those patterns, or any pattern at all?
No, but they should know that both gasoline and diesel exist, just as this teacher should have been able to either know that Firefox was a web browser, or to tell that it was when shown.
The laws we have already, or the laws we will end up with? If there was a convincing argument that the present laws of physics are the only ones logically possible, I'm sure we would have heard about it. As it stands, "mysterious logic we don't have yet" is a conjecture, not an argument. And the conjecture is more plausible if we assume we're not finished getting the laws down.
And imagining them is somewhat like asking whether God can make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, or imagining being your own grandfather via a time-travel machine: a mere exercise in word-play, allowed only by the fact that English is a sufficiently illogical and ambiguous way of communicating that all kinds of nonsense can be put into words and "make sense" grammatically without making the least bit of sense logically.Being your own grandfather is just predestination, there's no paradox there. Killing your own grandfather is more of a paradox. Anyway, on the language front, that's a pretty well-known and established viewpoint in the philosophy of language.
True either way. Life just is.
and because at any second someone could hit Ctrl-C and kill us all instantly, erasing our entire life's work, because the whole of human existance could be some process running in the background of a lab workstation, because someone would be watching us... because someone would be responsible for human suffering.Sounds like your problem is with God, not with simulations. I've read Bostrom's original paper where he gives the simulation argument, and he actually mentions this: if we are living in a simulation, then the simulation probably includes false memories from before the simulation began to run. What if there is in fact no suffering in the world, and all our memories of suffering are just illusions? Bostrom calls this a "far-fetched solution to the problem of evil".
Maybe it wouldn't make any difference to an animal, but I have psychological investment in the existential.Existential is the same either way. Just because it's a computer simulation doesn't mean it's not real.
Well, if this is a simulation then this era is obviously of interest to someone, and therefore we should expect more interesting things to happen. Also we should do interesting things so they keep the simulation running. Maybe if we're interesting enough as individuals than the person running the simulation will be pleased with us and will choose to use us in his next simulation.
And what relevance do these experiences have to me other than how they manifest in the application deletions. Are you saying their viewpoint is screwed up because they deal with so much crap everyday that a lot of good content is deleted and they can't see that? Are you apologizing for them? If not, then why does this even need mentioning.
I'm explaining the issue in hopes of fostering understanding. It's not a direct counterargument and it never has been.
It has nothing to do about my reading comprehension. It has to do with you being a liar. To quote from earlier: I simply will no longer donate time or money to Wikipedia and discourage others from doing so by warning them of what happens to their contributions. Please do, if it will stem the crapflood Wikipedia has to deal with already.
You might not have noticed a little word there: "if". You might consider whether or not your contributions, or those of your friends, are really even needed or welcome, and if you don't think they will be, I urge you to carry on in encouraging them not to offer them. Again the point about reading comprehension.
And in my opinion, many good contributors are leaving because they don't want to deal with what the debates have become(accusations of sock puppetry, self promotion, etc.) for content that is, in my opinion, good and shouldn't have to be defended in terms of notability. No need to respond to this. Your experience makes you disagree.
Good contributors leaving is a problem Wikipedia does have. I'm one of them. But to me a good contributor is someone who's proven themselves, and such a person will always have their opinion considered at AFD. If you want to talk about unproven contributors who might have become good, AFD is a small part of the puzzle there--Wikipedia is too insular for its own good.
That in no way changes my point that one of the founders of the project who, certainly, in his mind retains the vision of what he felt this project was, felt anger over deletionist policy when he was hit. This means the oldest of the old timers sees how things have changed and doesn't like it to the point of saying to the deletionists they should, "excuse themselves from the project and find a new hobby."
Actually, I went and read that remark in its full context, and he wasn't angry at deletionists for being deletionists. His full remark was as follows: "You can dispute the article on the merits of the notability (though not successfully, I think), but the assumptions of bad faith in this argument are just shocking. Some people should excuse themselves from the project and find a new hobby." So there it is--incivility out, good-faith concerns about notability in. The same policy we've always had.
Since I feel the voting process has been corrupted, with include votes cast aside and ballot stuffing the other way, I no longer have faith that the spirit of this principal is being applied. Now, I do think this is true the majority of the time, but I also think corrupt voting now happens to an extent that it has become a problem. And to save us some time, this is my belief and not true in your experience.
You could substantiate your opinion here with some examples. But that's too good for you. Rather wallow in ignorance I gather.
The talk pages are where people who have some interest in the topic are. Attracting contributors is the equivalent, to me, of attracting the "outsiders" even more so than occasional readers who don't have high edit counts. And since I believe AFD has been corrupted, this more likely than not means gathering deletionists and stuffing the ballots in their favor. Yeah, I know you disagree.
It's recently (as of 2007 or so) become standard practice to personally notify the creator of a page that's put up for deletion so they can say their piece. (Most such pages are rather new).
So you're saying either that it wasn't Al-Qaeda that attacked the WTC (who was it then? Jewish Neocon Freemasons?), or that Al-Qaeda was not based in Afghanistan. Sorry, I don't have time to joust with nutjobs this week.
I'm all for Wikipedia retaining proofs. I'd gladly see every single Pokemon article, for instance, deleted and replaced with a mathematical proof. But we don't have to make that choice yet, since Wikipedia has plenty of hard drive space and they can afford more.
Again the apology for ignorance. A teacher who assigns work that requires internet research should be able to know what's what, just as a teacher who assigns work that requires calculators should be able to tell a calculator from a gameboy.
I firmly believe schools need more discipline, not less. Students refusing to abide by a reasonable request from the teacher should get detention.(1) Using IE instead of Firefox isn't a reasonable request. It's a request borne out of ignorance. (2) Discipline is a virtue--it's not the same thing as arbitrary authoritarianism. The "obey the rules blindly even when they're ad hoc requests from someone completely ignorant of the matter at hand" form of discipline is unfitting a free people.
We're not at war with Iran. You can't lie the country into war when you haven't actually gotten the country into that war.
That argument might give a pass to someone whose reasoning is only roughly sketched out, but it doesn't excuse an outright argument by assertion.
...As far as I can tell, Bush only lied us into war once, in Iraq. The only other war was Afghanistan. Did you think 9/11 was faked somehow? Or that the idea (also held by the Clinton administration) that al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan was a lie?
Does Article II also empower the president to waterboard me, hook fake electrodes to my balls, or tase me? Or does it simply extend to listening to me having phone sex with my girlfriend while she's overseas?
Sure, but it makes a good conversation topic anyway--surely it's something that obviously could happen in our school system, and either way the value is in the discussion.
They should not be expected to be an expert on all things technology when that is not the subject they teach. What if the kid had been using Opera? What if the kid had been using iCab? How about NXS Mosaic? How about some spyware/adware laden browser shell?The teacher should have noticed that the software in question was, in fact, displaying web pages and that the program was, in fact, a web browser.
The student was provided with a perfectly adequate tool to do the job, there is NO REASON that he could not use the requested browser, and refusing to do so was lipping off to the teacher, and preventing the class from moving forward.There's no reason he should be prevented from using Firefox. If I'm in a math class and I want to use my HP calculator instead of the TI's they hand out, the teacher shouldn't respond by saying "that's not a calculator, it must be a gameboy or a hacking device, stop using it or you will go to detention." Responding that way only illustrates his ignorance. And we aren't dealing with anything as exotic as postfix notation here, just a different web browser that works fundamentally the same way.
I am getting tired of responding to you people. Is this Ignorance Of Political Science Week or something?
If you're going to assign students to do web research, evidently you're supposed to be teaching them to use web research, and thus the internet is at the very least a background or prerequisite topic that the teacher should be conversant in.
I'm not explaining to you why some things get deleted, you illiterate prick. I'm explaining the formative experiences of "asshole deletionists"--the experiences that form Wikipedia editors into that given viewpoint on the project.
And how about the "crapflood" accusation. That uncivil statement was unquestionably directed at me.Given that it's taken three incidences of repeating myself to explain the above point to you, you're probably not at the level of reading comprehension for me to attempt any further clarification. Please tell me English isn't your native language.
Here is one where a lot of keep votes were accused to be socks. As I say, I haven't spent my time forming alliances, so I cannot vouch for them. But a lot of keep votes were definitely tossed pretty easily. See more in comment below.That one seems a little borderline, but the opinions of well-experienced veterans definitely count for more in AFD discussions for reasons I've already outlined to you.
In terms of outsiders at Wikipedia, I guess it depends on what you consider an outsider. Someone who reads and is a fan of a webcomic but doesn't edit may be considered an outsider to you, but if he is a unique individual that has an interest in the topic, I think his vote and arguments should be counted. And this is setting aside all my feelings about how many content creators have no interest in politiking and bureucracy, while the deletionist do. So insider inclusionist policy is under represented. Maybe that means too bad for them. Anyway, I'll skip this tangent for now.In my experience, a lot of people who are very committed to keeping their work in Wikipedia are very ardent in these deletion discussions--although I can see how many overwhelmed newcomers may be far less persistent.
One example which you have consistently ignored is the speedy delete for the article Mzoli's Meats. Since Jimbo has been around since the beginning, and his reaction to the delete was surprise and some anger, I would say you know a lot less about the rules than you think.I think the skepticism over that article was reasonable and largely in good faith, though the way it was communicated may not have been. The main issue there was a lack of reliable sources, which goes to the reliability and accuracy of the article. Incidentally, Jimbo hasn't actively involved himself with editing or adminship since 2003 or so. He's more of a financier and public figurehead, and doesn't keep terribly in the loop.
I want the burden back on the deletionist to justify their actions rather than the inclusionist.It is--no consensus defaults to keep.
So these two example articles would have the debate on the talk pages, and only after extensive discussion could it be nominated for deletion.Talk pages are rarely trafficked--the purpose of AFD is to attract the attention of more contributors to the discussion.
At the current state, one has to spend one's time in energy wasting debates, having to constantly be aware of deletion nominations, needing to form alliances with admins to keep your work, all rather than creating content.Honestly, the politicking doesn't stop there--and if you have solid content to contribute, it rarely starts there. One reason it puzzles me to see people fixate on this issue is that there are so many worse problems with Wikipedia that influence our important content--whining about our treatment of content that falls between local high schools and individual Star Trek episodes on one end and vanity pages on the other is a minor concern in comparison, even if it is as bad as you think it is. (What could possibly be more important, you might wonder? Issues like systemic bias, agenda-pushing communists, politicking taking precedence over substance, quality rot, relative disinterest in unglamorous work, and community growth happening faster than community learning.)
I meant for the child.
Hello, I am [NAME], SGT, USA at Guantanamo Bay, and I believe this article is factually incorrect; I would like to clarify that Fidel Castro is an admitted transsexual. If any further information is necessary, please feel free to contact the Army's Public Affairs division at [E-MAIL & SNAIL-MAIL ADDRESSES].
There's a difference between corporate environments--where centralized network computing makes sense--and the home environment. Because with the home environment comes an important question--where do you keep naked pictures of your girlfriend? I'm not being facetious--privacy is an issue, and I would prefer that the contents of my hard drive (IM transcripts, personal diaries, bank account information, etc.) were not available online.
That's not leveraging a desktop monopoly--that's leveraging a pile of cash. IE is a better example of leveraging a desktop monopoly--get everyone to use your browser by including it with your OS, ensure that your browser supports a non-standard version of HTML and a new technology called ActiveX, and use that to sell more copies of FrontPage and IIS. What MS did with the Xbox is the same thing Sony did with the PlayStation, or Apple did with the iPod--use an existing pile of money from one business to enter another business, hoping to find some money in it. Microsoft just has a bigger pile of cash than most.