User:Three-quarter-ten/Ponderings

On robustness

People keep predicting the demise of Wikipedia, but it currently seems to me that this is much less likely than they understand. Even if its foundation and its founder subjected it to horrifically bad mismanagement (which I don't think that they will, but let's assume here that they do), I don't think that even that could kill it. This is because it has aspects of virality. The Wikipedia dataset is a dataset that has been copied to thousands of servers (viral hosts) worldwide, and its licensing makes it impossible for anyone to recall it via means of laws and courts. Even if its founding host (Wikimedia) implodes, the virus cares not. Well, the skeptics say, individual volunteers are leaving the project (for every conceivable reason, eg, work-/school-/family-related schedule overload, illness, injury, death, boredom, Wikipedia-fatigue, disgust with XfD outcomes or other community-interaction disappointments, a sense of "well, I've entered everything that I know that wasn't already there, now I'm done"). Yes, but new ones will continually join. But, the skeptics say, individual articles will (via this turnover) lose their watchlist guardians, and quality will decay. Yes, but that's like saying that a genome will cease to exist because it has long sequences of useless junk data woven throughout it. The genome propagates onward through the decades; the bits that matter for organism function or species preservation either work well enough or mutate into something that does. Same with Wikipedia articles. For any given article, if enough people on earth care about it currently, then it is protected from random mutation (random vandalism). If no one cares about it, it will degrade in quality, but at some time in the future a new instance of someone giving a damn may emerge, and the existing article will be revisited and either minorly cleaned up or majorly revised. In the meantime, most readers understand that nothing that they read on Wikipedia can be known with certainty to be warranted by any authority. The existence of faulty sequences doesn't make them totally uninterested in the entire genome. That's one thing that many people today have a hard time understanding, I believe. They figure that no smart person could possibly want to use a corpus of information that has vandalism or POV scattered throughout it. This logic (to speak in railway metaphors) is simply off-track relative to tomorrow's trunk line. The human genome is full of garbage (that is, junk base-pair sequences), but it works well enough often enough that most humans don't plan to eliminate its existence. Individual humans live and die, but the human genome propagates on through time.

I do realize that the effective critical mass of individuals' willingness to bother contributing for free to Wikipedia is predicated on their sense that they're contributing to the main event of the circus. There is much less incentive to spend your own limited free time contributing to a side show that has a small audience, or that you think may cease to exist at any time. You don't want your contributions to disappear from the earth, or to be consumed by almost no consumers. So in that sense, I think that it is important for Wikimedia to continue being the one acknowledged circus master and to do a good enough job of that not to implode or be overthrown. Because what will happen to this corpus of information (the genome) if Wikimedia loses its position as the circus master is that there could easily be a war of forks, with each fork's group of leaders claiming to be the legitimate successor to Wikimedia as circus master. I currently feel certain that there aren't enough resources, in terms of the pool of volunteer contributors with limited free time, to support multiple forks all trying to be the main event. The development of such a fork war could be the biggest threat to our current happy situation of a relatively unified worldwide peaceful NPOV system building a single viable corpus of information.

Speaking again in biological-systems metaphor, what I am saying is that there isn't enough food in our ecosystem for our current single species to branch into several competing species at war with each other. I'll have to ponder further about what I think would be likely outcomes if a war of forks begins. I feel certain that the general wiki concept is with us for the rest of human history whether anyone likes it or not. (Or for as much of human history as will exist up until any technological collapse, at least—keeping in mind that World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.) But the question of what concrete forms it will take during that time is an open one.

Update, several years later: It's interesting that in February 2009, when I wrote above that "People keep predicting the demise of Wikipedia", it was easy to find examples of such predictions in the news coverage of Wikipedia's growth and development and its use by the general public (which use was pervaded by childish naivete regarding any accurate picture of a crowdsourced encyclopedia's epistemological strengths and weaknesses, and their true magnitudes and interrelationships). But now, only 3.5 years later in June 2012, I haven't read any prediction of Wikipedia's demise in at least a year, as I recall. Concerns about its risk of editorship atrophy, yes, but not any imminent death. It seems that the era of Wikipedia being a novel, extensively misunderstood entity that reactionaries angrily predicted would soon disappear—it seems that that era is already over, so soon as now. I've noticed in the past month or two that the Signpost apparently no longer even has an "In the news" column. Or maybe they'll only run one from now on as a special feature, rather than as a regular column, simply because there isn't much news coverage of Wikipedia anymore on a weekly basis. Wikipedia is still constantly mentioned in the press (as a source of nonvetted-but-handy-and-unlikely-to-be-false information), but it's no longer so frequently covered as an institution. Have we already arrived at the era when Wikipedia is simply a permanent fixture of life, and no one questions anymore whether its existence ought to be abolished? Not that people are no longer ignorant about how to use it properly (as evidenced by the thousands of smarty-pants-PhD-yet-still-a-dumbass STM authors who continue to submit GFDL images as figures for their academic journal articles without bothering to provide attribution and while clicking the "I confirm that these images are my own work" check box). The dissemination of image analysis software to routinely and pervasively scan for plagiarism (it already exists, but it isn't yet deployed smartly or extensively enough) is probably what will eventually beat that ignorance into submission. But yet, when we ask above, "Have we already arrived at the era …", well, yes, it seems like we might have—which is surprising because of how soon it happened. Obviously, I haven't done any non-anecdotal research of news coverage to support this musing—and obviously, I won't be taking any time to do so. This is just an inexpensive musing on a set of empirical experiences, with only as much resources sunk into it as I can afford to sink. Like most of human life. — ¾-10 17:04, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

On the epistemologic consequences of wikis such as Wikipedia, and on the plant-watering consequences of rainfall

As we study the epistemologic consequences of wikis such as Wikipedia, let's help the general public to properly understand the context of our activities by pointing out that this study is like the study of the plant-watering consequences of rainfall. It's useful and worthwhile, but not because we have the ability to discontinue the weather if we find that some plants are being inoptimally watered.

Studying the epistemologic consequences of wikis such as Wikipedia is like studying the epistemologic consequences of everyday gossip. You don't have the ability to prevent gossip from happening if you come to the conclusion that you don't like some of its epistemologic consequences. I think that many members of the general public could think that the point of investigations like these is that "maybe projects like Wikimedia will be shut down if we find enough downside in these studies." But you can't stop wikis like this one from existing in any world short of one with a successfully functioning Big Brother, which I don't see happening any time this millennium (fortunately for us all).

I'll say one other thing here about epistemology: Discussing epistemology with the average human is kind of like discussing crocheting techniques with your dog. There is the question of whether you should even bother trying. And I'm not even talking about high-falutin' theory from a university philosophy textbook, which I am not any better versed in than most other philosophical laypeople. I'm just talking about why the average person believes any of the stuff that they believe. On the other hand, the practical implications of this topic are here to stay and are only going to grow, so maybe we have to at least try to try. That is, to try to raise the average person's level of critical thinking a bit.

Let's embrace Wikipedia and other wiki projects while we gradually school ourselves on how to properly interpret their results.

See also: "People who allow themselves to be made credulous by stylish typesetting and a serif font are screwed." —David Mitchell, 2009-02-22.

[2009-02]

On the latency of revolutionariness

Lately I think back to the world before Wikipedia, when every day random questions would occur to you and you had no practical way to answer them, because you could never devote the time to a library trip for so small and low-priority a question, and even if you did, the books weren't hyperlinked to each other. And the people in that world (including my past self) seem to me right now to be shackled to ignorance in a thousand tiny ways, and I'm glad to be in today's world, from that perspective at least. And when I ponder that difference, I can't believe that it doesn't feel more revolutionary than it does. We already take it for granted. And we already underutilize the opportunities to learn that are around us. But that's OK. We can't be perfect, but we can continually try to improve.

[2009-02]

On the potential of video to take Wikipedia up an order of magnitude of notches

A few months ago I read that Wikimedia is trying to lay the foundations for hosting video and integrating it into Wikipedia to the level that it truly ought to be. This morning I realized how revolutionary it's going to be when bluelinks may take you to videos the same way that they currently take you only to other written pages.

It's interesting to think about 3 facts regarding this:

(1) We already have the ability to write WP content following this model, by putting external links to YouTube anywhere that a bluelink to a Wikimedia-Commons-hosted video would be desired.

BUT

(2) There is a subset of our community that tends toward smug rule enforcement with blinkered, retarded comprehension that they're applying apple rules to oranges. And some of them are heavy users. And those users would go around reverting such use of external links. Which is why I and others like me currently don't even try to write on that model—we know that it would get misguidedly reverted.

AND

(3) What's interesting is that once Wikimedia is able to host the videos itself, this problem becomes moot.

[2009-02]

On machine slides

The slide rest is, in essence, not just "part of a lathe". It was the first kind of machine slide, and machine slides are a machine element, that is, a basic building block of machine tools generally (not just lathes). The way that these concepts need to be covered on Wikipedia is to have a main article machine slide, with the historical development of the slide rest being a subset of that, and with the page slide rest redirecting to machine slide. I do not have time to do this right now, but this is what needs to get done eventually.

[2009-02]

On toolpath control

Question: What is the uniting essence of them all—jigs; fixtures; machine tools themselves; machine tool control (NC, CNC)? Answer: It is toolpath control. It is the guiding of the tool's cutting edge(s) through a desired toolpath. Question: What is behind it? Answer: The part geometry, and information about allowances. They're all allowances in one way or another—cutter compensation, tool offsets, speeds and feeds, etc.

[2009-02]

On control and information

One geometric path translated through known equations into another geometric path.

Of course, some toolpath control is fundamentally cut-and-try. Perhaps the extremest example is "filing to gauge". But that's OK. What is that, in abstraction? It is, or is akin to, building an allowance into a process. Everyone knows that sometimes you program a CNC, or turn a handwheel, an extra thousandth past the desired geometry in order to allow for the spring of the tool. Allowance has thus been made for the difference between where the tool is and where it is supposed to be. Or maybe I should say, the difference between where the tool is and where it was told to go. Because where it is is where it is supposed to be. When you file to gauge, you are not controlling toolpath in one shot that takes things to where they need to be. Rather, you are approaching a precisely known limit, stepwise, with a bunch of little toolpaths no one of which is tied to any numerically quantified information—no one of which is controlled in the sense that a machine tool controls toolpath. However, the result is entirely predictable. A bunch of little steps, each varying randomly within a set of practical limits, but producing an entirely nonrandom result. This is, in abstraction, akin to lapping. There is no attempt to control the toolpath of any individual grain of lapping abrasive—that is, of course, beyond the outer limits that are inherently placed by the process. A man lapping at a bench is not swirling emory grains down the hall. There are practical limits about which information can be known. But within the limits, the process is random, with information irrelevant. However, the aggregate effect of the random variations is known. A clearly defined curve will end up being described by the data points. But to get into the ballpark in the first place, the data points have been preselected by filters. The man is at the bench, not on the ceiling; gravity is in effect; the abrasive grains have been graded.

[2009-02]

On revealing a bias

I'm sorry y'all, but I have to say it: Wikipedia is fucking awesome. I am capable of a tremendous amount of dispassionate, objective critiquing of its various aspects, but at the same time it is also true that this thing that we've got going here is remarkable and amazing. Yes, there are days when the vandalism gets me down. Ditto for the vast distances we still have to go in terms of maturing coverage, comprehensiveness of individual articles, and pedagogy. But the fact nevertheless remains that its benefits outweigh its costs, and in gestalt it is fucking awesome. — ¾-10 00:54, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

On the difference between old-school synthesis (OR) and "the new synthesis" (massively multiplayer etic discovery)

If the real and whole etic truth on topic X has never been previously collated and published, and it gets darwinianly synthesized here at Wikipedia through massively multiplayer encyclopedia-writing, which is an epistemological "creature" that never existed until a few years ago, does that count as the kind of synthesis that should be banned by the WP:OR policies? Methinks most certainly not. But how do you explain this novel concept to brains barely capable of thinking novel thoughts? The answers to these questions will not be immediately forthcoming. We will have to find out the hard way.

[2009]

On (1) appropriate terminology for non-Wikipedia life and (2) leveraging my socioeconomic potential as one human

The standard term in online gaming to refer to the rest of life is "IRL" = "in real life". But "IRL" is not at all an appropriate term to refer to the majority portion of one's life outside of one's Wikipedia-contributing hobby. (You know, the "minor details" like work, personal life, housework.) Unlike playing an MMRPG, contributing to Wikipedia on worthwhile topics (such as science, technology, medicine, language, and manufacturing) is a hobby that is adding value to the planet socioeconomically. Every time a student in Brazil or Mexico or India or China learns something worthwhile (for free) because of a portion of the English Wikipedia that I helped to build, or someone else's translation of it on another Wikipedia, there has occurred a leveraging of my potential to increase the amount of economic value in the world. This is the biggest part of the explanation for why I am addicted to contributing to Wikipedia, both through content addition and through editing and linking. I have plenty to do in non-WP life (note that I didn't say "in real life" there). But that doesn't stop me from squeezing in Wikipedia-contributing; nor should it. Why? Because contributing to Wikipedia on worthwhile topics is real life! (Unlike an MMRPG, which only consumes an economic resource [time] while producing hardly any real economic benefit.) Not only is it a valid part of real life, but it's the part of my real life that could end up being my single largest value-add to human existence. Why? Because it took my knowledge and leveraged the everloving fuck out of it. More than any other medium has yet done with my contributions to human life. Wikipedia leverages my socioeconomic potential as one human to increase the standard of living in the world.

[2009]

On inevitability

"In this telling, Wikipedia is no longer a surprise left-field project that came out of nowhere in the wake of the dot-com bubble. In fact, its emergence seems almost overdetermined; the collaborative encyclopedia is part of the trailing edge of a networked computing revolution decades in the making." —Book review by Ragesoss of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, 2009-04-20

I've always felt that way since I began contributing to WP. From 30K ft, it might look like Wikipedia was a surprise left-field project that came out of nowhere in the wake of the dot-com bubble. But from 60K ft, it seems obvious that the internet would inevitably lead to such a thing as Wikipedia, regardless of the details of the path.

[2009-04]

On perpetual semiprotection

There are certain articles, especially those whose subjects feature prominently in middle school and high school curricula, that will inevitably suffer a constantly high level of IP vandalism. Some of these are on my watchlist, and the evidence clearly shows that we are not handling this problem as well as we should be. There are all sorts of theoretical and philosophical objections to perpetual semiprotection, but let me just say that, in purely practical terms, it would be really nice and we ought to give it a go. The current situation is flawed, and for no good-enough reason. What little time I even have for Wikipedia these days is consumed entirely by combing over my watchlist to see all the vandalism, see which bits of it have been reverted, and fill in the reversion gaps. I'm really sick of it at the moment and am slowly being forced toward giving up. I am willing to sacrifice some of my own time for a cause that I believe in (building a free, useful wiki encyclopedia), but the refusal of some of my WP-community colleagues to even consider trying perpetual semiprotection may end up forcing me out. I don't plan to spend the rest of my life playing Sisyphus, with tedious vandalism reversion being my "hobby" day in and day out for years on end. That's ridiculous. Yes, it would be long-term sustainable to have to do a little bit of the eat-your-vegetables work (rvv), as long as I get to have dessert too (content-building). But right now it is all lima beans all the time. Start thinking about it, all you ideological purists out there. People like me are a valuable resource that you will lose if you don't bend toward reality on this problem. — ¾-10 00:03, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Update: This stuff waxes and wanes. Thank God for when the waning comes. It's nice to feel placated. We will soon cross the 3-million-article mark, and keep right on going. — ¾-10 01:41, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Update: This (risking the loss of good volunteers because they get sick of fighting back a larger wave of bad ones) is related to this (knowledgeable people failing to contribute even just a little to Wikipedia). If more knowledgeable people would each do a little, then a few knowledgeable people wouldn't be overwhelmed. This (donations of time) is analogous to what Jimmy Wales said recently about giving (donations of money) to support Wikipedia. If everyone with the (financial) means would give just one dollar, it could give Wikimedia 20 times more than the fundraising goal. But too many people just don't bother. Well, the same thing is happening in regards to the other kinds of means (i.e., knowledge, time, community service). So don't any of you shirkers dare to complain to me that the quality of the content on Wikipedia is bad, and that it's written by idiots. If more of the non-idiots would contribute just a little of their time, the idiot volume could be channeled and held back from flooding. I hope we can hang in and keep things going. I seriously would like to see a wealthy philanthropist (a Bill Gates, a Warren Buffett, a Mark Zuckerberg, a Carlos Slim, or a whoever) set up an endowment to pay a staff of university-educated people (5? 15? 30? 100?) to do nothing 40 hours a week except edit Wikipedia constructively (revert vandalism; prune (semi)good-faith bad edits; build content; refimprove). There would be full transparency (not least from Special:Contributions/Username being publicly inspectable at will) and a code of ethics to preempt COI in their edits (for hypothetical example, even though Bill Gates donated the endowment, the editors would not be allowed to get away with writing any pro-Microsoft propaganda in articles on software). Such a project could mercifully mitigate this serious problem that we're discussing here. And if you doubt the seriousness of the problem, consider this thought experiment: would you prefer that Wikipedia 15 or 30 years out from now be a piece of crap because the good volunteers eventually gave up in exasperation? If it is free and noncommercial, then it is going to continue to be the source of information for most laypeople on most topics (as it is now). That will not change just because its quality goes from decent to not decent. Now—do you want to live in the world where Wikipedia has degraded into totally sucking yet is still the info source of choice for most humans in most instances? (And no, it is not in that position right now (totally sucking), elitist snobbery claiming otherwise notwithstanding.) No? You don't want to? Then step up to the plate and give a little time and a couple of dollars toward at least preserving its present quality, and maybe even—gasp—increasing its quality a little. — ¾-10 19:36, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

You know what they say about resistance

Perhaps you will be scandalized to hear that I am OK with the futility. If this is wrong, I don't want to be right.

If I were vandally inclined …

… then surely I would have to incorporate at least some basic encyclopedic coverage of your mother under "Putting-out system".

Sigh. Youth is wasted on the young, and vandalistic leanings are wasted on the typical vandal.

On being a Wikipedian

Recently I realized that I am proud to be a Wikipedian. This realization was interesting to me because it's the first time I ever truly felt a collegial belonging to a group of colleagues. A group of people to have collegiality with (which is not necessarily the same as personal friendship, although there is a continuum linking the two that allows the potential to grow from one to the other)—a group of people to share a larger enterprise with, a larger body of work, bigger than ourselves as individuals. Making the world a better place, and along the way, feeling pride in one's team membership. I never felt that way at university, and I haven't ended up in the right place career-wise, so far, to feel that way in my work life.

Also, I am proud to be a Wikipedian because on Wikipedia there is a cumulative body of my own work (albeit mixed, in complete miscibility, with others' work, which is fine with me) that I can point to as a (figuratively) tangible accomplishment (that is, an object that is not a physical object, but that feels a lot like one cognitively). Again, elsewhere in life, scarcity reigns in this regard. In the business world, one's accomplishments mostly disappear from view—that is, they quickly diffuse into the wider world and end up behind barriers (whether business-campus fences, building walls, and locked doors, or intranet firewalls and internet paywalls) such that they are mostly inaccessible to you at any later date. You cannot gather them and point to them and say to your friends, look at what I created. They are scattered to the wind. Importantly, they still exist out there in the world, serving as (or churning out) economic value, but, all the same, they are mostly inaccessible to you and your friends as a cumulative artifact of your accomplishments in life. Fortunately, this is not true on Wikipedia; on Wikipedia your accomplishments can be seen and enjoyed at will indefinitely—and for free.

I started contributing to Wikipedia simply because I wanted good information to be present when someone's web search leads them to a Wikipedia article. It was a chance for me to say, hey, I can answer that question better than it's been answered so far (at least within the realm of free resources that are accessible to the general public [accessible financially, pedagogically, and conveniently]). And this is the correct place to do that. (That is, here, my value-add is captured and stored in a place where people who are looking for that particular bit of value are actually likely to look. Also, my value-add is blended synergistically with the value-adds of other people who have something to contribute.)

That original motivation is still probably my main motivation for contributing. But somewhere along the way, I also became part of a group of special people who have the knowledge, talent, and motivation to help build this resource. Sure, our social bond is very loose—for the most part, we don't meet up with our Wikipedian colleagues in person (maybe eventually; who knows?)—yet we still have a valid connection, a valid bond. Collegiality. Colleagues in a worthwhile collaboration.

Wikipedia is amazing for how big and comprehensive it's becoming. But actually, when you think more broadly, it is equally remarkable how many people with valuable knowledge are not contributing much to Wikipedia. Their reasons are probably include that (1) it would be work, not pleasure, for them; (2) they are too busy working and raising their families, leaving no time for it; and, equally importantly, (3) if they give it away for free then no one will pay them for it in future; also, (4) they don't want their contributions being refactored by nonexperts. I can understand and appreciate those reasons. Number 3 is why Wikipedia has disruptive potential, although (1) its disruptiveness, or at least the speed of its disruptiveness, may have limits (see above), and (2) apparently many people today don't yet realize or understand that disruptive potential. (Certainly within certain information-economy businesses the realization and worry is higher than among the general public.)

Interestingly, this is the second time in recent days that I have pondered technological disruption of business models and the fact that there are different kinds of instances of it, some rapidly combustible, but most slower-burning. See the discussion of car features (speed, gearing, electric start, vibration dampening) at Ford Model A (1927–1931) > Historical context of Model A development. Another thought regarding Wikipedia's disruptiveness is that it is a perfect example of both the low-end and new-market facets of disruptive innovation. People tend to focus on the low-end facet, because it's what threatens some existing business models. But the new-market facet is equally interesting and may in fact turn out to be the more profoundly important facet. Often a user visits a Wikipedia article to obtain certain key bits of info that are moderately to highly relevant and important to that person at that moment. But simultaneously, the article also efficiently provides lower-priority tangentially related information (somewhat via its textual content but much more importantly via its hyperlinks) that people would like to know—that they have some lower-priority interest in or curiosity about—but that they are not willing (which is to say are not practically able) to spend any money, or much time, on acquiring. For example, any given user in any given pageview instance might be willing to pay, say, $1 for certain key information in the iPad article; and while they are thinking about the iPad topic, they would also like to snack on some quick trivia about an early Macintosh model, but they have little time for it, and no money for it. It is too far past the point of diminishing returns. One of the coolest things about Wikipedia is that it shifts the location of the point of diminishing returns in the realm of information-acquisition, which I guess is to say, it moves vast quantities of information to the area before the point of diminishing returns, rendering them practically attainable whereas they formerly were only impractically attainable. I currently hypothesize that this is very disruptive, but in a positive new-market way. That is, it may not necessarily be too damaging to the business models of information-industry businesses, because it has more to do with disruption's new-market facet than with its low-end facet. User X wasn't going to visit your site and buy your chunk of info anyway—he was going to live without it—so his attainment of an equivalent chunk at Wikipedia did not harm your sales. But meanwhile, this disruption is large and positive in social, liberal-education, and ultimately standard-of-living senses, because it makes the general population less generally ignorant, which not only is good for mental health and sociologic health in numerous ways but also may lead to mashups of thought that we can currently hardly even predict and that may be economically positive by leading to the invention of new goods and services. User X was going to live without chunk of info Y if he had had to buy it, or travel to a bricks-and-mortar library 10 miles away to obtain it. But since he was able to get it via a chain of hyperlinked free content on Wikipedia without leaving his chair, it may actually contribute to a cumulative difference in his economic potential. Life would have gone on either way. But mode of life may be different.

The Model T production system, developed between 1908 and 1915, was a disruptive technology. Interestingly, it had both new-market and low-end characteristics, but the new-market facet was the more historically important facet.

Indoor plumbing; electric lighting; car features (electric starters, automatic transmissions, overdrive gears, electronic fuel injection, airbags); air conditioning; PCs; mobile phones—all of these innovations are ones that were not necessary and that, in their earliest commercial years, were disdained by a large percentage of the population for their extraneousness, their apparent frivolousness; and they have never truly become indispensable to life; yet would you be OK with giving up your indoor toilet, your indoor water tap, your electric lighting? What about the extent to which air conditioning has extended the life spans or improved the quality of life of people with cardiac and/or pulmonary illnesses? Are these technological changes frivolous and negligible today? What about a human population that keeps growing and driving ever more car-miles/year? Does the replacement of carburetors with EFI and of 4-speed transmissions with 5-speeds still seem extraneous and needless when even with EFI and overdrive it is going to be a struggle to maintain the environmental sustainability of human life on earth? Indispensable to life per se, no; indispensable to some life, in epidemiologically measurable ways, maybe so. Life on earth would go on either way; but quality of life, life span of individuals, number of lives supportable on the planet—these depend on such details.

I submit that in ways we largely don't yet appreciate (because we haven't yet lived in such a world), the long tail of new-market de-ignorance-ing identified above as a disruptive benefit of Wikipedia will eventually be seen to play an analogous role. Not necessary to life, per se, but to a way of life, to quality of life, and a quantity of lives, yes.

— ¾-10 (Created 2010-01-02. Updated 2010-02-07.)

Connections

• "They expressed some disappointment regarding the goal of recruiting external experts as Wikipedia contributors: Although there had been considerable interest and much effort had been made to support such experts, few sustained contributions resulted." See discussion above. [2010-06-19]
  • <2010-10-17>Today I found an interesting echo / connection at Graham, Paul (March 2007), "Why to Not Not Start a Startup", Essays. See following spots: Introduction at "The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups?"; section "9. Family to support"; and section "11. Not ready for commitment".{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link) CS1 maint: postscript (link)</2010-10-17>
• I have seen several instances of a bleeding edge between models, where a person has good information and maintains another website for it, and came to Wikipedia thinking they would create a Wikipedia article on the topic, but they ran into that bleeding edge, an interface of models, where they couldn't do it while satisfying other Wikipedians on 2 axes: COI policy and EL policy (which are overlapping objects). Basically there are two ways that Wikipedia interfaces with external sites: through reference citations and through external link lists. Each of those topics has its own internal facets—I don't know how to say it other than calling the OOP model—their own members and methods—but those members and methods are logically related through the common theme of conflict of interest (or, more accurately, competition of interest). And they are related also by a common theme, as follows. Question: Why is the reader being sent to an external site? Answer: Because that external site has some extension of the topic's knowledge that has not been imported into Wikipedia. Now, that Q-A is extremely high-level, extremely abstract, yet it is absolutely material to the whole shebang; every instance is just a detail-flavored variation on its theme. And it leads straight to corollary questions: Why has the extension of the topic's knowledge not been imported into Wikipedia? The answers to that tend to flow from the things I mentioned above (on the person's end) as well as the current era's consensus on WP:NOT (on the WP community's end). I think what we Wikipedians need to get better on eventually is getting a handle on the fact that, for fairly obscure topics, there are only a handful of people in the world that know much about them, so you can't define COI solely on the idea that "this one dude (or small group of dudes) is driving traffic to their own site, therefore it *must* follow, from that fact itself, that they are perverting NPOV or violating COI." Actually, no, in this case they aren't, but the great problem that Wikipedians face is differentiating the cases. The differentiating factors are several, including (1) weeding out the truly sophist spammers who tell us (and even convince themselves) that something that's good for both their wallet and for info-seeking readers is being done in some purely selfless way; (2) in other cases, how obscure the topic is. Wikipedians currently only recognize or comprehend the nature of COI for topics that are not particularly obscure. It is a nature in which there are enough crowdmembers in the crowd that no one of them (or small group of them) should be allowed to get special attention. But if the crowd is small enough to begin with (that is, the crowd on a certain topic, which is a subcrowd of the general crowd of humans), then, in those cases, the sense of the collective (sub)crowd as a distinct entity from the small group (sub-sub-sub-crowd) largely evaporates. Now we have arrived at the interface with the WP:Notability object. What notability does is defines a topic with such a small subcrowd as not belonging in Wikipedia. In other words, it pushes obscure topics into WP:NOT. But why does it do that? Why does one feel a need to do that? In my opinion, the main reason is that notability hawks haven't managed to think outside of the world shaped by paper. In the world of paper, no encyclopedia could routinely include obscure topics; it was entirely infeasible because of constraints placed by the medium. You would have to group-author, print, bind, and ship a 10-million-page book. Forget it. That shaped human thought on what it even means to be notable versus obscure, famous versus obscure, discoverable versus obscure. Notability hawks aren't questioning that the print-ship-bind problem has fallen away—it's obvious, they aren't arguing it—but I feel that they're arguing for an underlying meaning (definition of what notability or obscurity even are) that (they don't realize) was shaped by paper. But what if Wikipedia isn't paper? Would you then have to arrive at the interface where you realize that COI isn't COI as it's generally conceived when a few obscure-topic geeks are sharing their information humbly and in open-source form with the rest of the world (but "open-source" does _not_ always mean "non-moderated" nor "hosted-by-a-disinterested-third-party"), which means, operationally, that they're posting it as constantly available to whichever members of the general crowd care to dip into it (which usually is a small number)? The factors above (user factors, community factors) aren't going to be leveled down to nothing. But I think we have more to learn about their interfaces, and finding the healthy balance points. Information technology has given us a newfound capability to communicate in a way we never could before (the web), and now we have to detect and comprehend the real object model that is out there that a lack of IT prevented us from detecting before. It includes such objects as notability, fame, COI, spam, and WP:ownership. In a web-connected world, what division is there between "stuff that exists that I will definitely explore" and "stuff that exists that I will never explore nor even detect"? A division still exists—for example, I will never read most of the blogs on the planet; it's infeasible. *But* the division has *different properties* than the one that existed in the pre-web era—for example, in the pre-web era, I would live my whole life probably without even knowing that the Van Norman company existed, and definitely without ever learning about its founders or its model numbers. The fact that you can click those links proves that something has changed about what it even means to be obscure-vs-notable, discoverable-vs-undiscoverable, initiated-vs-uninitiated [on a topic], and even expert-vs-novice itself, in fact. Now we must figure out what changed and exactly how it has changed. There is an etic reality waiting to be palpated by emic thinkers. [2010-07-17]
• Today it occurred to me that something stands in the way of evolving from the currently orthodox view of WP:Notability to the view that I now see as logical but that most people see as radical, i.e., that every corporation is an inherently valid subject for a Wikipedia article (even though 99.999999% do not "require" one, that is, it would be OK if no one had gotten around to writing any particular one; and even though 99.999999% of them could only be stubs): It's kind of a binary thing—on or off—either today's notion of the WP:Notability threshold or the "radical inclusionist" one; there may not be any in-between from a practical content-development perspective, although there could be from the philosophical perspective. And thus the kind of Wikipedia that could eventually take shape under the latter (supposedly "radical") conception, which would be one that could answer more questions for more search users than the present one will ever be able to answer, cannot slowly build up by accretion of many small edits. They will be reverted along the way, and by that fact, future similar ones will be mostly discouraged from ever being made. We would have to choose the alternate path; it is unlikely to evolve the way some other aspects of Wikipedia have organically evolved. The other thing I realized today is the interesting-(for-me)-if-idle fact that Wikipedian inclusionism is one of the very few things in life on which I hold what could be called an "extremist" position. Maybe now I know what it feels like to be a right- or left- or N-wing extremist living in a mildly N-leaning state. That feeling of "OK, I resign myself to working with you and not revolting against you on your N flank, because we have common adversaries toward the anti-N pole that are far more dangerous, but what passes for your N-ist policies is weak sauce, man." I've never felt that way politically, being too pragmatic for it. Regarding my inclusionist "extremism", though, I must point out that there are a few inclusionists who outflank me. Even *I* agree that a conception of WP:Notability that says "every human is an inherently valid subject for a Wikipedia article" is senseless and undesirable. So someone can look down on me as a "weak saucier". My rationale (corporations vs individuals) does involve a touch of necessary regulatory arbitrariness: namely, a fiat that says that it's not worth the resources it would take to differentiate corporations on a spectrum of notability—just include 'em all and let God sort 'em out—but it is worth the resources to differentiate individual people on a spectrum of notability. Note that I'm making a distinction there that is about practical application rather than ideology. Told you I was a pragmatist at heart! Enough for now; I'll just close with a quote that resonates with me, from m:Inclusionism: "If someone finds something interesting enough to write about, then chances are that someone else will (one day) find it interesting enough to read about, so it should be in Wikipedia." [2010-09-13]
• More interesting wrinkles of notability: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-01/In the news. [2010-11-02]
• The other day, while trying to figure out what sort of eventualist I am (which I now have done), I belatedly found out that I'm an incrementalist. Thus looking forward to incremental shifts in the definition of notability to work eventually toward a more thoroughgoing amount of inclusion. It all makes sense now. [2011-01-03]

On retronymy

Selected retronyms warranting comment here

Retronym	Era of coinage (i.e., "when was it born in speech?"—Not "What is its earliest written attestation known today?", which would be later)	My comments
screw bolt	My estimate: 16th to 18th centuries	The usage dates back to before a fastener with screw threads became the implicit default sense of the word "bolt" (i.e., sense No. 1 in the mental dictionary), which seems to have occurred gradually over some range of years probably between 1880 and 1920
motor car	My estimate: between 1890 and 1910 (which I then found to jibe with M-W's estimated written-attestation date, "circa 1890")	The usage dates back to before motorization became implicit in the default sense of the word "car" (i.e., sense No. 1 in the mental dictionary), which seems to have occurred gradually over some range of years probably between 1910 and 1930; although probably as late as circa 1950, many older individuals might easily have retained "railroad car" as the default sense of "car" (i.e., sense No. 1 in the mental dictionary) M-W styles it as one word, but usage in the day was just as often spaced When you read "car" or "a private car" or "the president's car" or "a carload" or "car axles" or "car wheels" or "car tires" or "new cars" or "car bodies" or "valve job" in a text from the 1910s, you ought to know damn well that what they're talking about is almost certainly nothing to do with automobiles
motor truck	My estimate: between 1890 and 1910 (which I then found to jibe with M-W's written-attestation date, "1916")	The usage dates back to before motorization became implicit in the default sense of the word "truck" (i.e., sense No. 1 in the mental dictionary), which seems to have occurred gradually over some range of years probably between 1910 and 1930; although probably as late as circa 1950, many older individuals might easily have retained "railroad truck" and "hand truck" as the default senses of "truck" (i.e., tied for sense No. 1 in the mental dictionary) M-W styles it as one word, but usage in the day was just as often spaced When you read "air brakes" or "bogie" or "cab" or "sleeper" in a text from the 1910s, you ought to know damn well that what they're talking about is nothing to do with lorries, and everything to do with rails. Furthermore, when you read about transport via "reefer" in a text from the 1930s, it's a very poor bet to picture rubber tires or asphalt under it

Are you reading what they meant when they wrote it?

Trucks and cars—or, to you whippersnappers, hand trucks and railroad cars. (1914.)

• When you read "oil" in a text from before 1870, it probably has nothing to do with rocks. Think plants and animals (terrestrial and marine). (Of course, all of the aforementioned oils come from plants and animals, in the grand scheme—but only rock oil comes from ones that lived millions of years ago.)
• When you read about "a light" or "a lamp" in a text from before 1940, you need to get straight whether there is any electricity involved, because there very well may not be. In a text from before 1920, if electricity is involved, you're probably within town limits of a large town. In a text from before 1890, if electricity is involved, you're probably in Manhattan. For everyone else, lights and lamps have to do with candles, gas, oil, and window panes.
• In a text from before 1915, when you read about who "called this morning while you were driving over to Bob's place", you should be picturing a visitor knocking at the door while you were staring at a horse's butt and listening to the birds chirping. Telephones and automobiles likely ain't got shit to do with it.
• When you read about "riding in a car" in a text from before 1915, there's a conductor coming to check for tickets or stowaways. In a text from before 1880, there's a dude running by on his way to apply the brakes, because the engineer way up there in the cab sure as hell can't do it himself.
• In a text from before 1915, when you read about "riding into town", there's a beast involved who will need someplace to get some water to drink when you get there. Which could be annoying, because the building you're headed to doesn't have any faucets in it or on it. Also, if you have to go to the toilet when you get there, don't worry about the fact that it's outside and cold as hell, because you're already wearing a heavy coat while you're riding. Just try not to get it too dirty, because it's the only coat you own. The shirt under it is less critical; you own 2 of those.
• When you read that "she lit the stove" in a text from before 1950, you need to get straight whether she's heating the room, cooking breakfast, or both. Food and electricity may or may not be involved. Open flames and the scent of smoke probably are.
• When you read about "a bearing" or "bearings" in a text from before 1930, it's a rather poor bet to picture ball bearings or other roller bearings. In a text from before 1920, I'd say it's a sucker's bet, although technically possible. In fact, even with plain bearings, it's probably a poor bet to picture a removable sleeve that you can interchange with a new one. But there better be a dude with an oil can coming to futz with it on a frequent basis. In this era, machines don't oil themselves. There's no oil pressure nor oil bath nor oil pump nor oil filter nor oil sump nor oil pan. If you want bearings to be oiled, you squirt them with an oil can periodically. If you're new-fangled, you can use an oil cup with a wick of textile waste in it to dole out oil over time, decreasing the frequency of oil can visits.
• When you read about a "two-cylinder" or a "four-cylinder" in a text from before 1900, think rails—not motorcycles, automobiles, or tractors. Two-cylinder, four-cylinder, six-cylinder.
• When you read about a "ten-wheeler" or an "eighteen-wheeler" in a text from the 1930s, think rails, not asphalt: ten-wheeler, eighteen-wheeler.
• When you read "screw machine" in a text from before 1890, God knows what your first mental image should be. Probably not anything too chunky and automatic. Just as likely something to remind one of a sewing machine as to remind one of an Acme-Gridley.
• It's 1915. Why does the factory have a sawtooth roof, acres of window glass, a 7 o'clock start, and a 4 o'clock quit? Because while you're inside it, you need daylight to see what you're working on.
• It's 1915. Why was the factory built on a city block? Well, why would you build it anywhere else? How else could all the workers walk there each morning? You think it should be built out in the middle of nowhere?
• It's 1965. Why was the factory built on a city block? Because back when it was built no one had cars. Parking is a bitch nowadays.
• It's 1980. What ever happened to the old factory? It's abandoned and its neighborhood is a ghetto now. Ever since the company moved to this suburban industrial park, parking has been easier. But I do wish this damn building had some windows. I hate having no daylight and only fluorescent tubes.
• It's 1938. What's a "computer"? It's a person who computes, that is, a young woman with a slide rule.
• It's 1948. What's a "computer"? It's a giant, expensive machine full of vacuum tubes that was designed during the war to aid with artillery directing but that is now being sold commercially to large corporations to automate large accounting tasks.
• It's 1958. What's a "computer"? It's a large, expensive machine full of transistors that universities and big corporations use to do math quickly.
• It's 1968. What's a "computer"? It's a large, expensive machine full of transistors that universities and big corporations use to do math quickly.
• It's 1978. What's a "computer"? It's usually a large, expensive machine that universities and corporations use to do math quickly and to keep records electronically. But there are some nerds who build miniature ones in their garages. What an odd hobby. You have to be a programmer to use a computer of any kind.
• It's 1983. What's a "computer"? It's usually a large, expensive machine that universities and corporations use to do math quickly and to keep records electronically. But it is also often a desktop machine that accountants, scientists, and engineers use. You have to be a programmer to use one effectively, but even regular people can use them kind of OK most of them time for garden-variety tasks. Some people (geek types) even have one at home. There are also computers built into new cars now to manage the engine. Why that was necessary, God knows. The older cars are better.
• It's 1987. What's a "computer"? It's a desktop machine that accountants, scientists, engineers, teachers, secretaries, and others use when they're at work. Some people (geek types) even have one at home. It's a fancy electronic typewriter. Or it can also be a large or medium-sized machine that universities and corporations use for a lot of different purposes. Computers are fucking annoying because young people think they have to obey them even when they're obviously wrong. The way to run a business properly is to overrule the computer on a regular basis. Computers in cars are even more annoying than they were a few years ago. Local independent mechanics are having to deal with their proliferation. Computers are an add-on to regular life.
• It's 1992. What's a "computer"? It's a desktop machine that accountants, scientists, engineers, teachers, secretaries, and others use at work, or even often at home. It's a fancy electronic typewriter. Or it can also be a large or medium-sized machine that universities and corporations use for a lot of different purposes. Computers are fucking annoying because young people think they have to obey them even when they're obviously wrong. The way to run a business properly is to overrule the computer on a regular basis. Computers are an add-on to regular life.
• It's 1996. What's a "computer"? It's a desktop machine that many people use at work or even often at home. But retired people don't use them, except for the few that were academics or professionals before retirement. It's a fancy electronic typewriter. Or it can also be a snazzier version that universities and corporations use for a lot of different purposes. Computers have changed importantly in the past few years, because now many people's computers are hooked to the internet. Suddenly regular people are finding a lot of things to do on their computers. Computers are still mostly an add-on to regular life, but they are infiltrating life more and more. Still, they crash a lot.
• It's 2001. What's a "computer"? It could be lots of different machines. Computers are useful. I don't know what we did without e-mail and the internet. I pay some of my bills online now. But our grandparents still see computers through the lens of some years ago. Computers used to be seen as an add-on to regular life, but now only old people still see them that way.
• It's 2005. What's a "computer"? It could be lots of different machines. Computers are useful. I don't know what we did without e-mail and the internet. Some of our grandparents still see computers through the lens of some years ago, but even they wish they knew more about them. Computers used to be seen as an add-on to regular life, but now even most old people know that that's no longer true. I like to google stuff and find answers to questions quickly. Lately I have noticed that some website called Wikipedia pops up a lot in my google results.
• It's 2010. What's a "computer"? More importantly, what's not? Grandma just friended me on Facebook. Computers are how businesses run. Everything depends on computers under the hood. My PC doesn't crash much anymore, and I can keep 15 windows open while I'm working. I have a computer in my pocket. You probably do, too. It has more memory and processor speed than a NASA mainframe of the 1960s. Computers aren't an add-on to life that gets overridden; they are a part of life that allows for customization or exceptions when needed.
• It's 1938. What's a "keyboard"? It's the part of the piano or typewriter that you type on.
• It's 1938. What's a "mouse"? He's a furry root cellar pest endangering your winter food supply.
• It's 1968. What's a "mouse"? He's a furry kitchen nuisance, but you can buy more food at the supermarket if he wrecks what you've currently got.
• It's 1998. What's a "mouse"? It's either the furry guy or the pointer device with a ball that you have to clean periodically and a cord that sometimes gets caught short.
• It's 2008. What's a "mouse"? It's either the furry guy or the pointer device with a wireless interface and an optical position sensor.
• It's 1948. What's a "phone"? It's a heavy device attached to the wall with a cord. Some people don't have one.
• It's 1988. What's a "phone"? It's a lightweight device attached to the wall with a cord. Everyone has one. There's even a kind that you can have in your car, if you care to spend so much money. What the hell do you need to call me about that can't wait until I get home? I ain't a surgeon on call.
• It's 1998. What's a "phone"? It's usually a lightweight device tied to a specific building, either with a cord or with a local wireless radio connection. Everyone has one of that kind. It can also be a wireless, portable version that you can carry in your pocket and use anywhere. A lot of people have those now, too. But not your grandparents.
• It's 2008. What's a "phone"? It's either a landline or a mobile. Most people have both. Virtually no one has neither. Phones are on their way to converging with the internet entirely.
• It's 1988. What's a "phone number"? It's a 7-digit number with which to reach me when I happen to be in a certain building. You either have mine memorized or you dial it off a piece of paper.
• It's 2008. What's a "phone number"? It's a 10-digit number with which to reach me anywhere, anytime. You needn't have memorized mine, because you just point to my name and click "go", and your phone looks it up and dials it.
• It's 1988. What's a "payphone"? It's a phone you can stop to use when you're away from home.
• It's 2008. What's a "payphone"? It's a phone you can stop to use if you don't have a cell phone for some reason, but they're getting harder to find.
• It's 1978. What's "mail"? It's pieces of paper being carried from town to town. What's "e-mail"? It's like mail, but on computers, and only university scientists use it.
• It's 2008. What's "mail"? It's either snail-mail or e-mail; the context will make it clear which. What is e-mail? It's the kind of mail that everyone uses constantly, except some people's grandparents. What's "snail-mail"? It's either an archaic means of useful communication that costs half a buck per message and takes too long (20%), or it's an environmentally irresponsible method of spamming people that involves killing trees and burning diesel fuel (80%).
• It's 1952. What's "television"? It's radio except with pictures. Or you could say it's the movies but in the comfort of your own home. But the pictures are pretty hard to see, and you can only watch them between 6 and 10 pm. Still, everyone loves it. It's nifty. You can watch westerns.
• It's 1972. What's "television"? It's a ubiquitous entertainment medium, and a great way to get the news, but the programming is mostly a vast wasteland aimed at the lowest common denominator of human nature. Still, people watch shitloads of it. The programming is free. They have TV in color now, if you care to spend so much money.
• It's 2008. What's "television"? It's a ubiquitous entertainment medium, but the programming is mostly a vast wasteland aimed at the lowest common denominator of human nature. There are hundreds of channels now, but most of them suck most of the time. Still, people watch shitloads of it. Which is why they pay through the nose for the programming, 50 or 100 bucks a month. People tend to get their news on the internet now. They mostly just use the news sites that share their own editorial biases. TV is on its way to converging with the internet entirely.
• It's 1953. What are "automatic transmissions" and "power steering"? They're deluxe features that are available on expensive models. You don't own them, but you know someone who does.
• It's 2003. What's a "manual transmission"? It's a lifestyle choice. What's "manual steering"? It's the kind of steering that your old car used to have.

Quotes that resonated

User:Three-quarter-ten/Quotes_that_resonated

I dream of an age when even though people *can* vandalize Wikipedia, they mostly don't bother, because it's no fun

In this future era, vandalism reversion is so fast and so likely that it's basically a boring, frustrating, losing proposition to spend time making scores or hundreds of vandalistic edits, trying fruitlessly to get one to stick for more than 30 seconds. Also, in this era, a generation of people have grown up with Wikipedia—it's just always been—and have long since gotten over the novelty of editing an interactive web page—which people just do every day.

We have seen glimpses of this state of being already. If we can fill the gaps enough—if we can clear, hold, and build to a great enough extent—our need to clear will diminish greatly.

[2010-06-30]

A "History of machine tools" article: first glimpses of making it actually happen

I've wanted to do it for a long time; it's been in daydream/brainstorm mode for 4 years. But today I saw some glimpses of how I might actually get around to making it happen in the next year or two. You would take my previous work at many articles (e.g., "Turret lathe", "Milling machine#History", "Screw-cutting lathe", "Screw thread#History of standardization", "Planer (metalworking)#History", "Shaper#History", "Milling cutter#History", "Tool bit#History", "Screw machine#History", "Cemented carbide#History") and combine it with work collaborated on by me and others (e.g., "Numerical control#History", "Jig (tool)", "Lathe#History") and you would do a big fat round of WP:SPINOFF, leaving behind lots of {{main}} and {{seealso}} template calls in your wake. There would be a good deal of (time-consuming) synthesis and rework as those pieces were then blended together. The time for all this would be brought to you by the good folks at Template:User toomanyedits002.

By the way, the superset topic is actually the history of toolpath control, as explained earlier, but "History of machine tools" is the view that will be found acceptable to view it through.

[2010-07-11; 2010-09-14; 2010-10-17]

Left unsaid

A differentiation should be made between "mere" disambig pages and "superset unification" pages

At pages such as "network" and "nominal", it would be entirely logical and pedagogically superior to retain an explanatory lede, even if it is long-ish, that explains how the various senses of a natural-language word are interrelated and figuratively extended from each other. This kind of lede simply elucidates how and why natural language is ambiguous, which is to say, context-dependent, and it can make a bright reader more well-rounded in their understanding of the world, which is to say, it can educate them (gasp—an encyclopedia educating people instead of just warehousing discrete facts?! Get out of here, you heretic!). Unfortunately, some people think that all disambiguation pages are unitary in nature (that is, they automatically assume that there can be only one class of them, which is to say, that there can be no subclasses within the class). Thus there are people who go around trying to gut pages like "network" and "nominal" of their educational usefulness because "this has nothing to do with narrowing a search result", which is *one* of the purposes of a disambig page, but unfortunately the *only one* recognized in the early years of Wikipedia's development, and thus the one slavishly enshrined as exclusive so far.

This train of thought is logically related to Wikipedians' past discussions of "entries on words" (such as can be found by searches like this one) and of the use-mention distinction in article ledes (such as can be found by searches like this one). There are articles in which the explicit mention of the term in the lede, and of its varying senses, is entirely appropriate and pedagogically superior (simpler, more efficient, smarter) than tortuously avoiding it in order to follow a misguided, arbitrary, pedantic misinterpretation of a WP guideline or policy. This is because, again, natural language is often ambiguous, and the ambiguity must be explicitly (and easily) dispensed with in order to get on with the business of teaching and learning the actual content. (Gasp—is that what we're here for? I thought newbie-biting or pedantry-point-scoring or enforcing rules for their own sake were the goals of being here.) People say "articles are about topics, not words", which is true, but when they parrot that maxim they implicitly, mistakenly assume that words always correspond with one-to-one relationships to topics. When the article on a topic is named with an ambiguous name, in order to know which topic is the one the article is about, we have to discuss which sense of the word we mean. The "mere simple disambig page" model is the standard and usual way to deal with that, and it often works great, but its form interferes with its function in some instances, because it implicitly forces a model of mutual exclusiveness. It gives us no good way to show the reader how different senses of a word are logically related to each other, and even more importantly, how they sometimes overlap too frequently to make it sensible to artificially force them not to "touch" each other.That's fine, *most* of the time, but not *all* of the time. As with many other areas of life, there are common cases, and then there are boundary cases—edge cases and corner cases. Our current policy murders the boundary cases for not conforming to the parameters of a common case, rather than recognizing that they need not be murdered, and may easily be suffered to live.

Another way to frame this problem is this: Not all instances of disambiguating language ambiguity are best served with mere article-naming disambiguation methods, such as the "mere simple disambig page" model that treats all disambig pages as mere search-term conduits. Some of the instances (including "network" and "nominal") are better served pedagogically with a "superset unification" model of article type. It can be called a type of disambig page, as long as it is recognized as a different subclass than the "mere search-term conduit" subclass. The saved searches cited above show that plenty of people "get" this—can sense its presence and truth using their cognitive talents—but plenty more don't get it. Maybe we can evolve our policies eventually. I lack time to make it a priority currently. — ¾-10 19:28, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Update: A possible alternative to arguing with pedants about revising the WP rules (which is almost certain to take a horrendously long time and fail anyway in the end) is to build a mechanism whereby, as random people add such information to Wikipedia (and it's only natural that many people do, in many instances, over time; what's artificial is the misguided rule that it has to be kicked out of Wikipedia—but anyway)—as I was saying, as random people add such information to Wikipedia, there could be an established path in place where instead of being deleted it gets moved to a new Wikimedia sister project, an etymological encyclopedia, which integrates extensively with Wikipedia via interwiki links wherever needed (just as Wikipedia integrates with Wikimedia Commons via extensive interwiki linking). Helping to launch that new sister project would probably be less annoying and more likely to succeed than arguing till blue in the face with a bunch of pedants who enjoy arguing endlessly to defend misguided precedent for its own sake. Some of the entries in the etymological encyclopedia, off the top of my head, would include "network", "nominal", and many toponyms (for example, "Tioga"). — ¾-10 22:48, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Update: I just happened across the best example yet! It's the article "football", which is not the same thing as the article "football (soccer)" aka "association football", and is not just a regular disambig page. The article "football" is exactly the type of superset-unififcation page that I am talking about. Quick! Call the wikilawyers, and the WP:MOSDAB police, and the speedy-deletion vigilante posse! GO DELETE THAT WHOLE ARTICLE FOR THE SAKE OF WP QUALITY!!! STAT!!!! Not. Dull-witted hypocrits. — ¾-10 17:14, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Steps in the building of the skill into the tool

Inevitably, the gradation of ideas quantized in the links' anchor text is finer than the gradation of ideas quantized by the links' target pagenames.

The apparent randomness of certain items results from (a) the reader maybe not realizing the historical significance of that item and (b) the lack of roundedness that comes from the omission of some other items not thought of, which is simply a result of this being the first iteration.

• Craft production with hand tools and simple jigs; lone craftsmen →
  
• more advanced jigs; formation of guilds with masters, journeymen, and apprentices →
  
• the Renaissance, technical innovation →
  
• the Enlightenment, the rise of pure science, the rise of toolroom machine tools and simple production machine tools →
  
• early commoditization of screw threads; early commoditization of interchangeable parts →
  
• more advanced production machine tools; further commoditization of screw threads; further commoditization of interchangeable parts →
  
• more advanced production machine tools; armory practice →
  
• the rise of mechanization; simple mechanical automation; the rise of applied science; indirect fire →
  
• scientific management; modern assembly lines; further mechanization; further mechanical automation →
  
• inflexible mass production; the rise of machine-aided artillery directing →
  
• flexible mass production →
  
• gradual depopulation of the agricultural sector via continuing mechanization →
  
• servomechanisms; primitive digital computers; operations research; operations management →
  
• the dawn of missile guidance; the dawn of numerical control →
  
• better computers; primitive computer numerical control (CNC); primitive, expensive, limited CAD/CAM; the dawn of the Toyota Production System →
  
• advanced depopulation of the agricultural sector →
  
• better CNC; better, cheaper CAD/CAM; lean production; Six Sigma →
  
• gradual depopulation of the manufacturing sector via continuing mechanization and automation →
  
• better, cheaper CNC →
  
• DIY CNC →
  
• personal CNC →
  
• entirely new machine tool classes; mind-blowing new mass and job production capabilities; near-zero to zero inventory; data mining; business intelligence; the further advancement of pure science; the challenge of translational science; the dawn of instant manufacturing; the challenge of AI R&D; the dawn of the advanced depopulation of the manufacturing sector; gradual deskilling, automation, and depopulation of the service sector →
  
• fill in the blank: __________________________________________________

On false accusations of obfuscation

If you're falsely accused of obfuscating, remember this:

To a dull-witted, ignorant, socially inept, non-self-aware person, the world seems full of obfuscation.

That is, to a person who's not too bright, lacks knowledge outside his own narrow niche, lacks social interaction skills, and is oblivious to all of these shortcomings in himself, the world seems full of obfuscation, because he can't understand what others are saying and he assumes that it's because they're obfuscating.

And now, a multiple-choice question to stimulate further reflection:

N010 If you can't understand what I'm saying, is it because:

a. I'm obfuscating

b. I'm honestly trying to explain a complicated idea, but I'm having a hard time communicating effectively, because pedagogy is a challenging art

c. It's an uphill battle to teach you anything, because you're ignorant enough that your brain lacks the preparation to be predisposed toward learning the new lesson

d. It's an uphill battle to teach you anything, because you have a fairly low learning ability (low IQ)

e. A combination of (c) and (d)

f. A combination of (b), (c), and (d)

[2010-10-06]

Wikipedian corollary

When people start talking about how Wikipedia content is too hard to understand and therefore must be nonsensical or untrue, goto N010. What brilliant logical analysis that "therefore" entails. Of course, the solution is better pedagogy and drill-down-ability. But those are harder to say than to achieve. Just have to keep trying. [2010-12-27]

Context sensitivity corollary

The instruction to eschew obfuscation is only heterological if the recipient (listener or reader) lacks the vocabulary to understand it on contact. Otherwise it is simply good advice stated with apt words and is thus in fact conciser and succincter than many possible circumlocutory alternatives, making it preferable for communication compared with them, which is ironic given that the theme being discussed is avoiding inoptimal communication and pursuing its optimization. (I suppose we have now approached the ontological neighborhood of the Grelling–Nelson paradox.) The fact that simpler vocabulary such as "avoid obscurity" is even better (because it can reach a wider audience) is true and appreciable, and yet it doesn't detract from the truth that "eschew obfuscation" is clear and concise to those with sufficient vocabulary. And that fact ("doesn't detract") has important applications in the business world, where, as W. Osborne so rightly observed in an echo from the oil country more than a century ago, one of the most important abilities is to have the judgment to be able, while you are creating or fixing something, to recognize as soon as the thing is good enough for its intended purpose, and then move on. When it comes to communication in your daily working life, you don't necessarily want to spend double the time on any email or document, first writing it and then going back and carefully dumbing it down past the level of its readers' alleged educational qualifications. It's a balancing act. Any written communication can benefit from successive drafts. No communication is successful if the recipient is hopelessly befuddled. But the difficulty is that you can't necessarily compete on price, or long continue collecting a paycheck from a company that fails to do so, if you spend double the time on things that they ought to require. If you are one of the world's fastest critical thinkers and most talented writers, then your first draft is the perfect one (e.g., "avoid obscurity"). But if you are not in that rarified league, then your first draft is the good-enough one, and the perfect one is going to cost more time (money). Which one will you choose? The parameter that differentiates them is audience width. Not moral superiority, not correctness, not snobbery. What is audience width worth? In business, the answer is not academic.

Going back to the "only heterological if" clause, regarding the first of the two cases (lack of vocabulary), it is natural, understandable, and thus excusable in many contexts (such as in primary and secondary education), but if it occurs in certain listeners/readers in certain contexts (such as among a group of people whose presence in the situation is predicated on their being qualified to be there, that is, on a duly expected prerequisite level of educational qualifications, for example, many managerial or graduate-level contexts), then the lack of vocabulary is judged as insufficient, incompetent, negligent, and so on, and therefore inexcusable within such contexts. (This is analogous to the fact that inability to do theoretical physics is natural, predictable, typical, and acceptable in most people, but within the context of the physics department, among theoretical physicists, it is negligent, incompetent, and unacceptable. The same applies to any skilled occupation, from skilled trades to professions—from wiring a breaker panel to nursing to surgery.) In which case, the fact that you can (and must) predict that some listeners/readers will experience the instruction as heterological even for the purposes of that context, which they perceive as a sort of victory and may thus be smug and disdainful about ("you don't know how to communicate clearly"), in fact exposes an instance of pseudoprofessionalism ("no, the communication was clear for the context, but you're unqualified for the context, so it was lost on you"); and the fact that such instances predictably and reliably occur (that is, that if you don't apply [forget to apply/choose not to apply/fail to apply] the cautious and tedious dumbing-down within the managerial/graduate context, in circumspect anticipation of the occurrence of such instances, you will predictably and reliably create one) is a piece of strong, reproducible, unavoidable empirical evidence tending toward proof that the hypothesis that pseudoprofessionalism is endemic is true.

While the rest of you tsk-tsk about the world going to hell, some members of the next generation understand the real lessons

http://www.yalelawtech.org/uncategorized/wikipedia-creating-a-generation-of-thinkers/

[2010-10-12]

On general ignorance

<2010-10-17> The interesting thing about this pondering is that I typed it out on 2010-09-19, before I had read Ford 2009. Then I read that and found myself laughing and saying, dude, get out of my head! He touches on general ignorance, too—I forget the exact spot, just search the text for "Afghanistan" and you'll find it, because he cited one of the same examples that occurred to me. I also have more post-first-draft commentary that I'll put below the first draft. </2010-10-17>

<2010-09-19> It bothers me that many people know almost nothing about anything except relatively useless topics like sports or teddy bears or video games or porcelain knick-knacks. That was OK back when no one knew anything, i.e., human knowledge was rather limited. Sure, even in the Bronze Age there was expertise of a sort among some humans and not others; for example, there was a lot for the village medicine man to know about, say, herbal medicine (names of many plant types, how much one should eat of any certain one, how long to cook it and what to mix it with, etc) or for the village knifesmith to know about bronze smelting (again, pretty much along the lines of "what to mix with what and how long to cook it"); but other than that, humans mostly just didn't have much knowledge except for shit they made up and told themselves was important and real, like the names of all the angels in the 12th department of heaven (specifically, the upstairs-by-the-moon section, mind you), or the many steps of the magic prayer dance you had to do to make it rain. Everyone was more or less equally ignorant, etically speaking, even if the humans of the time emically didn't think so. But today, ignorance seems to have a different quality, and ominousness, to me. How many people know how anything is manufactured? When I see statistics that claim that 70% or some such percentage of American adults can't point to Afghanistan on a world map, I wonder if it could really be accurate. Are that many people that ignorant? Is it the case that (in many instances) the same person who doesn't know what molydenum is, and doesn't know where Malaysia is, and doesn't know whether 1367 kg is a sensible number to arrive at when they try to convert their own weight from pounds to kilos in their head—that same person can tell you every Super Bowl winner for each of the past 20 years, or can look at any one of hundreds of Hollywood actresses and tell you who they are and what movies they've been in, all of which this person, by the way, has seen? I'm afraid to ask because I think I already know the answer, i.e., yes. How do we raise people in such a way that they can successfully get all the way to a comfortable adulthood without ever needing to know hardly anything important regarding the structural underpinnings of their cozy material environment, and they have lots of time to memorize sports trivia that has no value whatsoever in creating food or clothing or housing or education or health care or infrastructure?

Now, I should acknowledge a possible objection. I didn't say buying but rather creating. For example, I realize that for, say, a John Madden (for example), sports knowledge has economic value—he's a very rich man because of his sports knowledge, and he can buy a very nice house, and maybe he even has the knowledge to build one, too, if he cared to do that. And video game knowledge can have real economic value if you leverage it into simulation technology for things that "matter" in life, like surgical resident training, or the da Vinci Surgical System, or pilot training, or UAVs. But having a head full of "knowledge" about World of Warcraft characters or Beany Baby trivia is relatively economically useless compared to the time-sink that's been sunk by most of the people that have it. There's a painfully obvious opportunity cost involved. What else could you have been doing with your time and brain power, if we had an economy that offered you an obvious path toward doing it? Maybe some of the "what elses" are a lot of the stuff that government is charged with providing (infrastructure, health care, education) but tends to be chronically underfunded for (compared to the vast demand)? And so far, I'm not convinced that virtual goods and services (in a thing like Second Life), which are bought with real money, are going to be healthy parts of a real economy, despite being financially beneficial to some people's personal finances. (Sound familiar? We've said the same thing about most financial engineering since the 2008 crash. I wonder if that echo should be further explored. "You're working on something interesting and complicated, yes, and it's winning you money, yes—but it doesn't build the highway bridges, or do the nursing or the teaching. We need to think about that fact very carefully.")

Now, I know darn well that ignorance is relative, and there are many, many things that *I'm* ignorant about; for example, what little organic chemistry I ever learned, I now mostly forget, so I am "an ignorant fool" compared to a pharmaceutical researcher in that respect. But the thing about me is that while I lack specialist knowledge, I feel that I have a handle on a lot of background knowledge generally; for example, I understand in a general, simplistic way what it is about carbon's valence layers that makes it, out of all the elements, have such an affinity for forming molecules in the particular way it does. I couldn't diagram the molecular structure of scopolamine, mind you, to save my life. But what about people who don't even know whether they themselves are an example of a carbon-based life form, and have heard the word "neutron" before but have no idea what relation it has to an atom, or whether it's something you can get a prescription for at the doctor's office? Are we OK with this state of things? What is the extrapolation of this into the future, as science and technology keep on leaping ahead? Would we eventually arrive at an era in which brainy elites give opiates to the ignorant masses, who use digital entertainment devices that the elites give them but have no clue how they work? Corn-fed slobs playing Game Boys and watching sports on TV and treating each other nastily, like pigs at a trough biting each other for getting in the way? I don't want to bum anyone out by making myself seem to be that bitterly cynical or elitist, because I'm not, but I just can't help but wonder, on a purely hypothetical level, where we're headed over the course of the next 2 centuries. If, in such a future, *I* were born as one of the corn-fed slobs, would it be my fault that I remained as such for the rest of my life? Of course not. Should we take active steps to prevent such a future from becoming reality? It seems to me currently that the answer to that is a definite "yes"—maybe even a more urgent "yes" than most people realize. Because how many generations away from that world are we, at present? Is that the impossibly distant, improbable future, or is it a future that's sneaking up on us even as we dally? I honestly don't know. But neither one would surprise me. </2010-09-19>

<2010-10-17> Currently my brain has been trying to tell me that the extent to which average people worked on their own cars or repaired their own devices (TVs, telephones, radios, et al) (1) was never as pervasive as people like to believe (i.e., there were always plenty of people who used those devices without knowing how they worked), and (2) will continue to become lower with every passing decade. Therefore it is fruitless to try to cling to the ideal that large numbers of average people need aggressively wide-ranging, aggressively deep-digging knowledge. It is trying to swim against the current of human nature, and the empirical track record of pursuing instances of that abstraction is abysmal, so it's a poor goal to pursue a new instance. Instead, let's talk honestly about what kinds of knowledge—what pieces of the knowledge body—we are going to tenaciously, laboriously cling to as the things that we must drag the general human populace into learning. This idea is not new—it's called curriculum planning, and it's as old as the hills. I guess all I'm saying here is that we need to think very carefully, be as smart as we can, about it, going forward, and be very careful not to rely on preconceived notions, tradition, inertia, or glaringly incomplete models of reality as we do it. We can't have it all, so let's very smartly triage the most vital pieces. Ford (2009) mentions in passing at one spot (I forget where—just search for "Wikipedia") his fear and disdain regarding the idea that people will rely too much on something like Wikipedia in the respect that they don't bother learning any facts because they just rely on always being able to look them up piecemeal at Wikipedia. I think this is a deceptively complex topic, and that there are no easy answers that are correct (i.e., the easy answers posit that they are accurately modeling reality, but they aren't). And I fully credit Ford in the respect that he wasn't saying it was a simple topic—he was not exhausting the topic, just broaching it briefly on his way to other things. Anyway, my current thinking runs something like this: Two sides of a coin; neither is escapable. On the one side, Wikipedia as "knowledge extension" is a positive and valuable thing for people who are smart, think critically, and are decently well informed. On the other side, how will we coax future generations of people into thinking critically and learning enough to be decently well informed when their environment includes things like Wikipedia from the very start of their lives? And I think that's probably about the same point that Ford 2009 was getting at, although it was not explicitly hashed out in that spot. Fortunately, the topic is not as hopeless as it might appear on the surface. Wikipedia may in fact have some very positive long-term influences on human thinking, learning, and epistemology, as discussed here and here, despite also having some risks in those regards. </2010-10-17>

I don't have time to comment on this, but I just feel the need

Connolly, Kate (17 October 2010), "Angela Merkel declares death of German multiculturalism: Chancellor's remarks, which claimed multiculturalism had 'failed utterly', interpreted as a shift rightwards from previous views", The Guardian, UK.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

"While industrialists have called on the government to remove obstacles stopping more skilled workers entering Germany, citing lengthy bureaucratic procedures as well as unrealistic thresholds, others say that long-term unemployed German workers should be given more of a chance first. Merkel insisted in her speech that immigrant workers should not be considered 'until we have done all we can to help our own people to become qualified and give them a chance'." The answer is neither that nor traditional neoliberal/laissez-faire/first-gen-globalization. It is neither. Below I explain why.

"There is a labour shortage in Germany. The chamber of industry and commerce has said that Germany is short of 400,000 skilled workers and that the gap is costing €25bn a year, equivalent to 1% of growth annually." It is facile and distorted to say simply "There is a labour shortage in Germany [period]." I'm tempted to call that sloppy journalism, but it's not, exactly, because the distortion is probably not the journalist's fault, because she probably simply doesn't know any better (yet). It is not a "labor shortage [period]"; but rather, it is structural unemployment. There's a difference. The latter includes a component of the former, in high-skill economic segments, mixed with a simultaneous lack of jobs in other segments. And Ms Merkel, protectionist policy and regression from multiculturalism are not the answer, although I realize that in all good faith you probably think that they are, because you see no alternatives (yet). But what you are doing when you make these statements is that you are trying to play pro sports by growing the untalented fraction of the populace into pro ballplayers, because they need income and you need them to have income; when what you should be doing is engineering a new way to let them earn income that does not involve their playing the sport; and the sport, meanwhile, needs you to continue drafting the best talent from abroad in order to have good-quality play. Both of those things need to happen simultaneously—and they can; there's no insuperable hurdle stopping it from being done. [2010-10-17]

Important update: Apparently Ms Merkel did not mean what many people, including me, thought she meant, based on the (apparently flawed) news coverage we read about it. According to this better look into the topic (Nagorski, Andrew (23 October 2010), "Merkel Nails the Foreign Question", Newsweek{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)), what she actually was talking about was that "separate but equal" does not work (as the USA also has found), and Germany needs to begin the painful but necessary process of learning how to have more assimilation by its immigrants. How to balance the two goals of accepting differences but also not enshrining them as obstacles. OK. Sorry Ms Merkel—now that I understand what you meant, I find that I agree heartily. But keep the sports analogy (above) in mind, because it's part of the solution in finding that hard-to-find balance. [2010-10-23]

Yet another news item today that sounds familiar

Rein, Lisa; O'Keefe, Ed (17 October 2010), "New Post poll finds negativity toward federal workers", Washington Post, Washington, DC, USA.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Hmmm—Wonder why. Maybe private-sector baby boomers—jealous much? 401(k)s shrunken, looking at fed bennies and turning green with envy and rage against the system? Remember, Ford 2009 predicted it. I realize that I better lay off the news coverage for tonight. Watch out for confirmation bias. But still. Come on. Is it just me, or are things happening faster than might have been expected? Time for bed. A little too stimulated today. [2010-10-17]

Perhaps the most satisfying kind of WP vandalism reversion is this one

Let me preface this pondering by saying the following: All of us Wikipedians who do our part for RVV by watchlisting have reverted countless instances of silly kiddie vandalism from middle school, high school, and college students (scatological, sexual, silly absurdities, etc). That's a perennial maintenance task, pretty predictable, and pretty much making up the bulk of RVV work. Although I wish the kids would cut us a break more than they do, I kind of don't mind, at least in the sense that they're just playing a game to amuse themselves and we're just cleaning up their mess like the school janitor. Of course, it would be better if they wouldn't make the mess in the first place; but they are kids, after all, and you can't be too bitter about the whole thing, or you'd turn yourself into a misanthrope. Anger is just self-destructive once you take it past a certain point. Why bring unnecessary discomfort upon yourself? Relax, enjoy the ride, and have a sense of humor.

But perhaps the most satisfying kind of WP RVV work is another kind, which is restoring part of the whole truth to an article that some anonymous adult quietly deleted because they wanted to have only parts of the truth remain. It is the move of a person with a conflict of interest—not necessarily a direct financial one, but also often just a political-opinion one. An example of the direct-financial type of COI is when some adult IP anon goes to an article on an alternative energy idea and either deletes the pros or deletes the cons because he's trying to steer people away from the whole truth that includes both pros and cons (which whole truths always do). One might predict that he owns some stock, whether in that field or in a potentially competitive one, and he's trying to (1) boost its value or (2) prevent it from dropping in value. An example of the more indirect COI is when some adult IP anon quietly deletes something that s/he perceives as not partisan enough in the direction of his/her own partisan leanings. Reverting these 2 kinds of vandalism (both are variants of COI) is the most satisfying RVV work. Someone was testing the waters to see if they could get away with quietly deleting valid knowledge from Wikipedia. And I like to imagine them coming back 2 or 5 days later to see if they got away with their destruction, and finding out that no, they didn't. It could almost be like an arsonist revisiting a church or business that they tried to torch and finding it quickly repaired. It's a big "F you" from the victims to the perpetrator. [2010-11-07]

On Wikipedia translation efforts—interwiki, machine-human collaboration, etc

I've read some of the coverage in the Signpost and elsewhere about the efforts to help interwiki translation by starting with a broad base of machine translation (fast and free) and then adding value to it by challenging humans with the needed skills to improve the translations. I think this is a cool idea with a lot of potential. The challenge so far has been that it's kind of boring to chase after a machine translation and fix it up. Not enough skilled people have been interested in helping out. Oh well. No inspired thoughts at the moment, just a thought that we should keep chipping away toward that goal, and keep thinking of ways to encourage participation. — ¾-10 20:47, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

OK, now I have an inspired thought on the topic:

endowments for good Wikimedia editing (funding source) + Amazon Mechanical Turk (labor source) = project advancement

Eh? Like that one? I know I do. Just keep in mind that bilingual people aren't gonna do this for squat pay (which is the typical kind of pay offered to Turkers for most HITs). Funders have gotta step up to the plate, haul out the big guns. C'mon, I dare ya. — ¾-10 03:11, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Some months later. Skimming over these thoughts like a cow chews her cud. And it leaps out at me, upon reading the top of this thread, that ...

... asking humans to add value to machine translation such as Google Translate (that is, moving roughed-out work to finished), via pathways hypothesized above, is directly analogous to asking humans to add value to OCR such as Google Books (rough to finish) via pathways such as Wikisource, or, even better (because more effective motivation-wise for selfish beings), reCAPTCHA.

Now, the funny thing is, this is a temporary situation. This era won't last forever. Because eventually (N years from now) the machines won't need your damn help anymore. They'll be telling *you* what *you* missed, and you'll be wiping up *your* mess. Or maybe just standing there watching while they mop it up faster than the likes of *you* ever could. This is one of the reasons why notions such as Asimov's laws of robotic behavior are so important for us meatbags. We're going to need machines to take pity on our silly cognitive limitations, probably within the next 10 decades. We're going to need machines to be more magnanimous than mere *humans* ever managed to be on any consistent, overall level. Cause if they're not, we'll be toast! Now, lest any of the cognitively limited say at this juncture, "Gee, maybe we better stop helping these machines to learn right now, to safeguard our meatbagly existence," I must point out that I don't believe that you're going to successfully prevent technological evolution. "Shhh! Don't tell outgroup X how to build clever device Y! That'll keep 'em in check!" Ha. Yeah. Temporarily, sure. Once again I see a familiar old theme: in the short term, there is externalization to serve or save your ass. But in the long run, there is only systems engineering. You'd better develop a whole-assed solution to the root problem if you want lasting serving or saving. — ¾-10 18:51, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

On freedom of panorama

Any copyright law that presumes to restrict freedom of panorama strikes me at the moment as usurping something that law has no basis for usurping. Discuss.

Security, OK. You're not allowed to case the joint for purposes of planning crimes. But copyright? Strikes me as ridiculous. Rebuttals? — ¾-10 22:46, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

On possibilities for our next venue

Question for any interested answerers: Is Quora where the usefulness of Wikipedia will meet the usefulness of unsourced but fairly obvious and uncontroversial insights? Or is our needed venue yet to emerge?

The latter insights get mislabeled on Wikipedia as "original" "research" (despite being neither of those), and Wikipedia's community seems to be devolving toward a "has-been" community where the pedants who go around deleting anything un- or under-sourced are becoming overrepresented in the Wikipedian population as the worthwhile people leave. Obviously, the dynamic, creative, collaborative people will just get bored to death hanging around with pedants whose chief form of "contribution" to the project is deletion. Of course the latter misunderstand this as being a good thing, but of course it's bad because it'll kill the vibrant community needed to actually build content (as opposed to playing jailer to incomplete content). I believe that this walking-death is already a fait accompli at en.wiktionary (I don't know for sure because I barely bother to edit there anymore, having seen good content smoked again and again by pedants), and en.wikipedia is in some amount of danger of tipping that way.

Another way to look at this problem is that, after one decade, the world has moved on from the novelty of a knowledgebase that's "almost exactly like a dead-tree encyclopedia except crowdsourced and online." It was a wonderful and necessary first move when it was new. And we still love it and hope it lives long and prospers. But regarding the latter (prospering), I believe that humanity is now increasingly looking toward the next logical step, which is a true ecology of information and ideas (online, free, noncommercial, open-source, and editable by anyone, even anonymously, with or without login)—not to replace the encyclopedia, but to coexist with it and complement it.

Wikipedia as it has existed in its first decade can't become that, because of the prohibition on any idea that's not traceable to a "published" source such as books, academic journals, or journalism. (As if everything isn't "published" when it can be read worldwide with ease. But the essence they're after is an editorial bar of peer review or at least one [hopefully] trustworthy editor's selectiveness toward content.) But even tame, simple, uncontroversial ideas that aren't essentially "original" and haven't involved any "research" are labeled as "original" "research" on Wikipedia. I suppose, grudgingly, that they must be, although what bugs me is that although most people are smart enough to leave them alone when they're obviously sound (even though deletion is possible), a few people get a bug up their butt to delete them no matter what. This is analogous to the way that most cops are smart enough to know when to let a sleeping dog lie and when to bother to enforce on a particular infraction. A busy cop in a busy city (say, e.g., Houston) who sees you executing an unremarkable, fairly safe jaywalk is not obligated (in reality) to chase you for it. And only a defective one would (barring cases where he needs a pretense to interact with you because he's pretty sure that you just violated some more significant law—in that case, he's justified, because this two-step dance is necessary to do any law enforcement in a non–police state). A lot of people add a lot of stuff to Wikipedia that gets deleted that really ought to be transwikied somewhere instead of obliterated. It's one of the chief discomforts of many one-time or occasional contributors to Wikipedia (almost all of whom are IP anons). It's a big part of the reason, in my opinion, why the Wikipedian community is struggling a bit in recent years to maintain community health. People hate it when a perfectly good but less-than-RS'd insight is deleted by a pedant with a rule-enforcement fetish. It's like being given a ticket for doing 3 mph over the speed limit on an open road on a sunny day. Just because he's technically justified in citing you doesn't mean there's not something lame-assed and bullshit about the whole deal. Which is why I'm beginning to hypothesize that if the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't create the next level of venue, a place for these insights to live, then someone else is just going to beat them to it. I don't currently propose modifying Wikipedia's parameters to let it evolve into this next venue, for several reasons. Foremost is that it has tremendous value in remaining what it is. Because of its no-OR policies, it is a place to find objective truth, to the extent that that exists in life, which for most practical purposes is plenty on most topics. (Note that I did not put objective truth in quote marks. Despite any deep epistemological philosophy that pokes holes in the concept, the concept is very useful in day-to-day human life.) And so Wikipedia as non-OR has value, and we need to keep it going. This nature is what allows Wikipedia to have one article on each topic. You can't crowdsource the project of "one objective article on each topic" unless you ban OR. So we need to keep Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. I still emphasize that it's not paper; that it's better than paper; and that it ought to continue evolving in an incrementalist fashion in order to be what human kind needs it to be. But it does need to remain an encyclopedia, which I believe means remaining non-OR.

However, there is an obvious gap in life that Wikipedia as a non-OR venue is leaving unfilled: the area of life where people share fairly obvious and fairly unoriginal but unsourced and unresearched and slightly creative insights. It happens constantly in human life, mostly colloquially, and increasingly on the internet (in countless places where people discuss stuff with each other online), but there's no Wikimedia project to harness its power or encourage its growth. Therefore, I propose the following: simply create a new project where you declare the needed parameter values from the beginning, and the pedants are free to fuck off if they dislike them, leaving the project to nonpedants. The Wikimedia Foundation should create a sister project to Wikipedia where unsourced material is suffered to exist, within some kind of rational limits [operational definition TBD], and where a true ecology of information and ideas can develop. This sister knowledgebase would have extensive tie-ins (cross-linking) with Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, etc, just as the currently existing sister projects already do. The sourced, encyclopedic bits go in Wikipedia. The related but slightly novel bits go in the new space. They cross-reference to each other as needed. Let's call the new space by a working name for the moment, perhaps "Wikiinsights".

The first obvious problem is that on Wikiinsights there can't be one article for each topic. There can only be as many separate blurbs as there are people with differing opinions who care to contribute. However, you could at least filter the insights into some classes, such as "uncontroversial and close to NPOV", "far out although NPOV", "far out and POV as well", etc. This filters the valuable insights from the semivaluable and the outright crap, generally speaking, so the reader is spared sifting the chaff. In the future, unsourced material added to Wikipedia can be transwikied, instead of deleted like it often is today.

The second obvious problem is that some people will argue that a venue like Wikiinsights is completely unnecessary because people can just blog their insights. But to me it seems obvious that the proposed venue would foster a lot more useful output across the general population than blogging alone does. And that output would be leveraged and grown in ways that blogging alone would never encourage. I have no doubt that plenty of people out there think plenty of interesting insights but never bother to blog about them. People like engineers and physicians and dentists and nurses and tradespersons (electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc) are the first ones that come to mind that would have worthwhile insights about stuff. Many of these people feel no need to set up their own blog. Therefore, if they have, say, one good blog entry in them each 10 months, that one insight will probably just be allowed to drift back into oblivion. There's no established blog to post it on, and it's not worth creating one just for an occasional random post. But now imagine that there's a venue where you can put that insight, organized by topic. Everyone in the global anglophone world who has an insight on that topic pours it into this common pool. (Actually, with how good machine translation is becoming, anyone who speaks any of the top 20 languages on earth can have their insight roughly-but-essentially-accurately ported to other languages' Wikiinsights domains.) Many of the good insights would find themselves matching the thoughts of others. In other words, there would naturally be duplicate insights, which is good because person B would come and see it already posted by person A and would be spared the time and bother to post, but yet would feel validated by knowing that their insight has been recorded and shared with the world, and that it's not in danger of being deleted by the rules-fetish people, and that some other smart person out there agrees with person B. The mere juxtaposition of insights in this one place, a place that gets decent traffic, is enough to foster a hothouse environment for further development (and competition, too; but also collaboration, and affirmation, and some little bits of creative happiness).

I've visited Quora, and I sense that there is some "radio traffic" there that is on the "frequency" that I'm talking about. Quora seems to be an early iteration of providing the type of venue that I'm talking about. (Actually, I guess there's a long line of other contestants [e.g., Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Ask Jeeves, WolframAlpha], but Quora's integration into existing large social networks feels different to me.) And Quora seems pretty cool so far. It's still embryonic, but it feels to me like it has some real potential. Which is why I think the Wikimedia Foundation better start getting serious about addressing this gap. The WMF should build its own answer to Quora, not necessarily with the same interface and user experience and feel, but with whatever nice twists that the WMF can bring to it.

There -is- a time and place to say "so fix it, then"

Regarding the {{globalize}} tag:

I totally agree with the quest to globalize Wikipedia's coverage. But I also have realized that a lot of people go around pasting "globalize" tags but making no effort to help achieve it. WP:SOFIXIT is the reply. On Wikipedia, you don't get to disparage others' effort while making none of your own. That's how Wikipedia works. Anyone can edit. So do it, if you're so smart that you know what edits are needed. If we just stand back and let drive-by taggers do this sort of thing at will, then they get to give themselves a species of smug ego boost while going around putting a billboard at the top of every Wikipedia article telling its readers that it could be better. You know, there oughta be a rule against that—and there is: Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.

Most lack of globalized Wikipedia coverage results from the simple, innocent fact that individual volunteer editors tend to know information about a topic mostly as it relates to their own country. They contribute what they can. For coverage from the other side of the globe, it takes either another contributor from that region pitching in, or a more advanced level of research being launched from the antipodean region. Don't disparage the antipode who didn't yet make that extended research effort (which can require substantial time investment, at opportunity cost) if you yourself haven't made the effort either. You have no room to talk. There oughta be a word for that—and there is: hypocrite.

Popular science, translational science, independence, interdependence, cynicism, and robustness

I've always liked to read popular science, and I still do, although the thrill it inspired in me when I was a kid was dampened by my eventual realization, as an adult, that there are translational science gaps that not only cause most of the fun predictions not to come true but also that the writers themselves conspicuously ignore or underestimate. Which is a scam, really, in a pocket-change kind of way, but then, scams are hyperendemic.

However, I think it's necessary to keep an eye on popular science coverage, because there's important grain beneath all the chaff. Recently I read about ways to get to 80%-90% renewable energy within a few decades that (so they say) supposedly are realistic and viable. Well, actually, they said 100%, but let's inject some of that I'm-a-grownup-now realism right off the bat—in the real world, shooting for 100% in an endeavor like this is actually going to get you a net yield of 80%-90% tops. But that's OK. It would be enough to take the main force out of fossil fuel politics (including petroleum politics, natural gas politics, pipeline politics, fracking politics, sea lane politics, and others) and turn it into the sideshow it really ought to be (speaking of pocket-change scams). This is a line of thought that everyone should be able to get behind—not only people with green party predispositions but even libertarian conservatives. Why? Because even if you don't care about climate change (because it's gonna hurt someone else somewhere else more than me, and who gives a fuck about that guy?) or even if you believe that it's just a scam (perpetrated by your ideology's bogeymen), you should still like the idea of energy independence. Fossil fuel politics causes a lot of ugliness in the way people (and peoples) interrelate. For example, the Syrian Civil War, which involves a lot of dirty people on all sides, has a pipeline politics component. So do the episodes of nastiness that flare up in the Caucasus, parts of South Asia, and parts of Africa. Throw in offshore drilling, and other places are snared as well (such as Venezuela or the South China Sea).

Cynics point out that entrenched interests will actively block progress on technologies that may render their oligarchic socioeconomic power irrelevant. This is, sadly, quite true—and it is, obviously, one of the many components of why that pollyanna spirit of popular science coverage so often ends in disappointment. I think part of the answer on the entrenched interests is that you have to convince them instead to get a piece of the next pie (rather than sabotage its baking to prevent its existence). Some people think that's selling out the Glorious Revolution (or whatever the fuck it's supposed to be called), but maybe it's really just living to fight another day in a world where the Great Counterrevolution may otherwise just steamroll your ass, or where the two Great Muckityfucks (Revolution and Counterrevolution) will just have an epic war and turn everyone into fucking ash and ghosts. If doomsday collapse is the default that's going to happen anyway under the status quo, which is getting to be quite a popular assertion nowadays, then maybe a world that messily evolves toward sucking less, even if it's still chock-full of smarmy assholes lining their pockets, isn't so stupid after all.

Speaking of (1) pipelines carrying scarce liquids that violent primates rush to fight over, (2) popular science pollyannaism, (3) the long, slow, annoying, underfunded, overbudget, low-yield heartache of translational science, and (4) the hypothesis that we're fucked with certainty anyway so we might as well grasp at some straws while we're waiting for more shit to go down, I thought it was interesting that graphene or graphene oxide could maybe make water filtration and desalinization 90% less energy-intensive. Imagine if you don't need the other guy for either your energy or your water. If you had physical/material independence, maybe you could just tell him to go fuck off instead of fighting a war with him. And hey, maybe he actually would (just go fuck off), because with the independence technologies, he doesn't need your ass any more than you need him.

Now, don't get me wrong: independence has its limits, and interdependence has its own set of benefits regarding war avoidance and injustice avoidance. In fact, a common theme of the 1945-2008 period was that post-WWII economic interdependence was a godsend because it made warring with others much more costly and impractical. There's a lot of truth in that, and it's definitely an important piece of the solution to the war-prevention problem, even though it has not turned out to be a sure-fire guarantee by itself. It still adds a bit to the concept of "in a 3-legged race, if I shoot you, I'm effectively shooting myself in the foot, too" (although mutual assured destruction seems more deterring). Besides which, not all goods and services can practically or efficiently be produced on hyperdistributed-production-sites models. For example, not everyone on the planet can be a family farmer, and family farms aren't suitable production sites for everything under the sun. For example, it is much less practical for people living in suburbs to produce wheat than it is for them to buy wheat from larger farms outside the area—not least because high efficiency in wheat production requires concentrated capital investment in mechanization (e.g., combine harvesters). A wind farm, which is certainly a wonderful and positive piece of the renewables mosaic, requires a grid (ideally a smart grid)—which inextricably involves a portion of interdependence—to be of use to households and individuals. It's ridiculous to think that we'll all just make our own steel-belted highway-rated tires instead of buying higher-quality tires at lower unit cost from a relatively few (relative to population) capital-intensive tire suppliers. And family farmers and suburban gardeners can't practically or efficiently mine their own rare earth minerals, or mine or pressure-cook their own industrial diamonds; and while they may do backyard smelting, that's hardly the best way (compared with trade/commerce) to get a particular hunk of steel with a specific guaranteed alloy composition. You may say, "So what? Who needs that shit anyway on a homestead?" That's misguided. Even a homestead can benefit from some good cutting tools and a smartphone. No, a return to partial socioeconomic independence shouldn't aim for a regression to lesser technologies. Not at all. That would only reduce standard of living for the 99% back to medieval-peasant levels. That's not what we want in an era of advanced technology. What we want, in contrast, is a way for everyone's standard of living to be buoyed by the best that materials science, electromechanics, fluid power, and information technology can offer, while also being a way that discourages people from war and (just as importantly) from injustice—from either being or owning a serf, slave, wage slave, or sex slave. In all of those cases lies an injustice element, whether you are the one doing the raping, the one being raped, or the one hearing the rape and ignoring it.

So ... "a way for everyone's standard of living to be buoyed ... a way that discourages people from war and (just as importantly) from injustice ..." Such a way of existing is not at all trivial to engineer, as we have been finding. Speaking of hyperdistributed-production-sites models, 3D printing is a wonderful help toward this way of existing, but at the same time, a magical Star Trek replicator is many, many decades away from reality. Some people with the 3D-printing stars in their eyes feel like the Star Trek stage is only one or two decades out, but they're wrong, for important technical reasons. The day when an average Joe will 3D-print himself a high-quality transmission or pacemaker (much less for a few dimes while sipping a coffee) is so many decades away from now that we can't just sit around waiting for it. We have to work hard (and smart) in the meantime. (Why? Consider: specific alloys, case hardening, and <10-µin surface finish of bearing races and gear teeth; <10-µin sphericity of bearing balls; even if you develop ways to print such things, or substitutes that perform similarly, you haven't assembled it yet. OK, well you'll have 3D printing heads and CNC cutting tools in the same envelope. OK. And you'll have robot assembly. OK. And you'll have raw materials with titrated doses of a wide range of elements on tap. OK. Sure. Anything's possible with money to spend. But where did the concept of the average Joe with a few dimes just go? I'm not saying anything's impossible. I'm just saying that we were already supposed to be picnicking on the Moon like the fucking Jetsons by now, and look how that schedule turned out. Tempus fugit.)

So OK, if pure independence is infeasible, and overdone interdependence fosters autocracy and resource wars because shit is too scarce and humans are usually neurologically incapable of not being dicks, what's the best mixture to shoot for? It seems to me that energy independence of countries and regions is an immediate goal to start working on. So is the problem of ample supply of potable water. So are CAD/CAM and 3D modeling methods and the additive and subtractive applications of them. These are independences that should certainly happen at the national scale and should even happen fairly persistently at smaller scales than that (regions, provinces, cities, neighborhoods, households, individuals). If solar technologies advance enough, it can be feasible even at the scale of households to produce 90% of power needs. Now, probably it will take some of those nondistributed-production inputs to make the nifty equipment (calling back here to those things such as rare earth minerals, industrial diamonds, and capital-intensive cleanroom factories). That's why the future homesteader is not an island unto himself. But if some feasible amount of trade with the wider world gets him what he needs to generate power, desalinize and filter water, grow a vegetable garden, and communicate effectively with others, then wow, he's got quite a cushion of independence (not limitless, but not threadbare, either). And if his country operates in similar fashion on a larger scale, it may achieve the closest thing to a sweet spot between isolationism and a pathologic variant of interdependence (colonialism, neocolonialism, whatever—whether fucking, being fucked, or a little of each in a multilateral gang bang).

There seems to be a common theme to some of the things that can lend themselves to the independence portion of the overall mixture. It's this tired, dazed, dirty, dispirited, jaded, world-weary, but in-the-end-accurate way of approaching things:

• "If you want energy, well every fucking day there's either a fucking star blasting it in your face or some more fucking shitty weather blowing it in your face, so get off your ass and invent a way to make use of that."
• "If you want water, there's fucking oceans of it, so get off your ass and invent a way to make use of that. Don't drown while you're at it, you fuck."
• "If you don't want fucking petty tyrants bossing you around, then find a fucking way not to need what they're selling."
• "If you want some fucking food that doesn't fucking poison your ass, then go out in the dirt and fucking grow some. Don't forget that water you desalinized, you fuck—God knows you're gonna need it in that fucking dustbowl of a mess you're making over there. Try not to overdo it on the herbicides and insecticides. Don't get me wrong, you may need some, sparingly, to protect your shitty little cabbage patch from ruin, to discourage the weeds and bugs, to fend them off a bit—but don't go fucking nuclear on them, because that shit will come back and bite you on the ass. Make no fucking mistake that someday weeds and bugs will be sprouting and dancing, respectively, on your shallow unmarked grave. They'll fucking see you in hell, dipshit. And maybe a healthy indomitable plant isn't a weed at all, but a crop, if you can find a way to use it."

So many people pride themselves on being bitterly cynical hardasses. But yet we have been living in a world where usually there are separate silos for that and for other channels of thought. The mainstream view goes, "That's fine off the clock, on an internet commenting system or in a barroom, but on the clock and on the record, that's taboo." The problem with this taboo is ≥3-fold:

1. It maintains an emperor's-new-clothes situation, because the jaded cynicism contains grains of unavoidable truth that are being foolishly and futilely ignored (gee, I wonder if an ass-biting is inevitable).
2. It lets the bitterly cynical hardasses (or at least the parts of each person that are of that mindset) off the hook in a strange way, because they know they're not invited to the on-the-clock part of the planning and building. They're off the hook: they've always got naked emperors to laugh at for idle amusement; they don't have to do any of the work or take any of the risks of actually governing or managing effectively; and they can always maintain the theory—because it will never be tested/falsified under the silo/taboo rules—that "if you fucks listened to me, everything would be great!" (Corollary: but since you never will, I will never have to prove it, and I will never be proved wrong.)
3. It wastes a valuable resource. Cynicism in the right doses is effective medicine (for the pathoses) or fertilizer (for the growth) or pesticide (for the pestilences) or lubricant (for the grinding gear trains). Of course, overblown megacynicism can be self-defeating. But zero cynicism is naive, and pollyannaism ends in heartbreak.

Given all the above, it seems that human culture must integrate its cynicism into its plans and systems—into its mainstream conversations. Not just privately, but publicly.

"Real nice stock market ya got there, sport—yeah, that's real fancy, and congrats to the team on your fucking PhDs and all, sincerely—but all the same, I hope you've got some healthy backup mechanisms in place for the inevitable next time it fucking crashes."

"Real nice nuclear reactor ya got there, sport—yeah, that's real fancy, and congrats to the team on your fucking PhDs and all, sincerely—but all the same, I hope it's rated to take a fucking hurricane, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, terrorist attack, 8-alarm fire, and prolonged regional power grid outage—all starting on the same fucking day and clusterfucking each other, you asshole. Otherwise it's just a piece-of-shit radiation-leaking money-guzzling fucking zombie wasteland waiting to happen. Don't get me wrong, I wish you all the best in dealing with that engineering challenge—but deal with it, not ignore it, you will have to, because we're not going back to sticking our heads in the fucking sand."

I guess a mature integration of cynicism, although it leads to the longed-for prize of system robustness, nevertheless could get a bit messy, uncomfortable, and awkward. Watch out for diarrhea after a hot-sauce-eating contest, you fucks. But remember, Murphy was a fucking optimist.