How to wreck your point

[elfs]

Writing essays for a blog or other Internet site is a relatively straightforward matter, but there are the universal gotchas that destroy whatever point it was you were trying to get across to your readers. The classic is the Godwin Violation ("In any on-line discussion, the probability of someone mentioning Hitler or Nazis approaches one, and that person is usually assumed to have lost the argument."), but I am reminded of another, even more powerful dissuader of any writer's true capability to communicate.

Sam Vaknin, a contributor to The American Chronicle, a low-rent news aggregator with equally dim pundits whom you've never read before, reminded me of this in his article The Six Sins of Wikipedia. Many of his points are valid: Wikipedia is anarchic and I have no doubt that many of the articles are cut-and-paste from scanned materials (although how one copyrights a chart of electron shell diagrams or common hydrogen compounds is beyond me).

And yet Mr. Vaknin completely ruins his credibility with this phrase: "Evidently, Wikipedians are vehemently opposed to free speech when it is directed against them." He goes on to list a series of petty and childish attacks made against him on Wikipedia itself, including a parodic biography of Mr. Vaknin that has since been taken down at his request.

Don't shout "X is trying to silence me!" in front of a billion people. It looks stupid.

To be opposed to free speech in principle is the material of the religious fanatics who want to desecrate our Constitution in order to save an idol. The administration is opposed to free speech when it carves the public square into "free speech" and squelched speech zones. The Wikipedia kids are practicing graffiti on their own turf; complaining that what they're doing is tantamount to the real threats to our freedom is just plain dorky. Mr. Vankin, for all his complaints, has not yet figured out how to elevate his discourse above that of recess playground taunting.

Comments

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

The Vaknin article is very much incorrect on a number of points. To wit:

• "Everything in the Wikipedia can be and frequently is edited, re-written and erased and this includes the talk pages and even, to my utter amazement, the history pages!"

  Articles and talk pages can be rewritten to one's content - that's the purpose of Wikipedia. History, however, is immutable, with the exception that administrators can hide entries from the history when their continued presence causes serious problems - for example, if a historical edit contained libelous information, or constituted a serious copyright violation.

• "The Wikipedia is not an experiment in online democracy, but a form of pernicious anarchy."

  Straight from What Wikipedia Is Not (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOT): "Wikipedia is not an experiment in anarchy. Wikipedia is free and open, but restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with the purpose of creating an encyclopedia. Accordingly, Wikipedia is not a forum for unregulated free speech. The fact that Wikipedia is an open, self-governing project does not mean that any part of its purpose is to explore the viability of anarchistic communities. Our purpose is to build an encyclopedia, not to test the limits of anarchism."

• "The more aggressive (even violent) a member is; the more prone to flame, bully, and harass; the more inclined to form coalitions with like-minded trolls; the less of a life he or she has outside the Wikipedia, the more they are likely to end up being administrators."

  Blatantly false. Trollish users generally find themselves shot down very quickly.

• I'm not going to bother with his next point, other than to mention that the "error" was probably a disputed point, not a factual error, given that various Internet sources appeared to support Wikipedia's position. It also seems suspicious that he can't point out the error.
• "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia... at best it is a community of users who exchange eclectic "information" on a regular and semi-structured basis."

  And the difference is?

• "Wikipedia is the greatest single repository of copyright infringements. Books - from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual down to my own, far humbler, tomes - are regularly ripped off and posted in various articles, with and without attribution."

  Definitely not the case. Wikipedia is very strict on copyright, and scanned material is very easy to pick out when it shows up. It tends to get tagged and deleted quickly. (And again, if his own material is being ripped off, why didn't he do something about it, or mention where it shows up? The "books" he claims are being ripped off are more likely brief paragraphs used as fair-use quotations.)

• "The Wikipedia does not provide any effective mechanism to redress wrongs, address problems, and remedy libel and copyright infringements."

  Sure it does (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems). He must not have looked very hard for one.

It'd be one thing if some of his points were valid; however, hardly any of them are. The only concern he raised which has any validity is the occasional "anti-elitist" viewpoint; however, it's a known issue, and is being dealt with.