User:Bart Terpstra/Wikipedia:Wikipedianism

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The intent of this article is to describe Wikipedianism in a way that for the most part conforms with Wikipedianism itself and to promote a positive ideological process where you try to define what Wikipedia ought to be, rather than what Wikipedia is not, a via negativa approach.

Being a negative project has it's upsides as well, detailed philosophical arguments do not need to be had. As long as the editors are in consensus with eachother about what things mean and how things should be interpreted, you have saved yourself the hassle. But when they don't agree, disagreements become more fiery and almost guarenteed, there will still be a clear deliniation, a view that outright dominates, but it will not have been chosen with the rigor Wikipedianism sets for its own rules, it will have been imposed from outside itself.

Wikipedianism has been incredibly succesfull in achieving the goals it set out for itself and is viewed by most people(USA) as an authority on consensus truth. [but is has several areas it has failed spectacularly]. And this success now threatens the reliability of Wikipedia itself, as circular citations become more common and it has become a source of "major POV" itself.

The Encyclopedia that anyone can edit to add the view point of those the Encyclopedia already approves of.

Wikipedia is a bureaucracy. as much as WP:NOTBURO likes to point out that it is less literal than other bureaucracies, this does not mean it is rejected from the category. due to Wikipedianisms intense focus on rules, prodcedure and guidelines, we can conclude a bureaucracy has shaped itself around the process, whether intentional or not.

And it's quite important to not be a bureaucracy, because if it was a bureaucracy, people might point out all the ways that bureaucracies are often used to selectively apply rules, to sneak in non-wikipedian reasonings for rejection and how things defined outside of it's scope define what is inside of itself (e.g. we live under capitalism or editors are mostly post-industrial, non-agrarians, non-religious). (See also:Catch-22)

There are often cases where a new perspective editor edits an article, but for some reason or another, there changes don't get made and their critiques don't make a difference, yet, this always favours the status quo of Wikipedia.

This could be attributed to institutional momentum[clarification needed] or maybe....

"Strategic Inefficiency" is term coined by Sara Ahmed in her book "Complaint", it outlines reasons why bureaucracies become like this and how adressing issues within an institution become like a job in itself, because to complain about an institution in "the proper way", one must first become intricately familiar with how it works.

This can also lead to the off-putting reality that you will be restricted until you know the rules, but knowing the rules is no guarentee that the bureaucracy will actually follow or understand it's own rules. (why relevant)

"Exhaustion can become a managment tecnique...

So much of the work of complaint is work we would not have to do if institutions were as committed to creating open, accesssible, and inclusive environments as they claim to be." -excerpt from "Complaint!" by Sara Ahmed 

"Wikipedia, The Trial that anyone can edit"


"6. When a story begins with bothsidesing, readers are instructed that an object in the physical world (like a dam) is just an element of narrative. They are guided into the wrong genre (literature) right at the moment when analysis is needed. This does their minds a disservice."[1]

systems as analysed by Stafford Beer in cybernetics. systems take inputs to produce consistent outputs. systems deal with factorial explosions by creating rules that keep variety down.

As Wikipedia tests/guidelines become more important to consensus reality, they are gamed more often by the use of specific language by those interested in affecting consensus reality. An example of this would be obfuscating what something is, require any de-obfuscation on any page to have a verifieable source that does the deobfuscation in the specific context of the article.

e.g. vagrancy laws do not explicitly criminalize the homeless, but they are meant to target the homeless as they are a blight on streets and bring down the quality of the neighbourhood and house prices, but if a homeless man is frequently arrested for trespassing and loitering, wikipedia can not mention he is frequently arrested for being homeless, despite this obviously being the case, unless this deobfuscation has been written about in a reliable source in this specific context. (see:Killing of Jordan Neely)

Like most Liberal idealogies, they fear Demagogues.

Confusing strictness of rules for resulting in quality work.

Wikipedia is full of contradictions in editorial decisions, but this is on purpose. by having the mistakes in different place, rectifying is not possible because this is seen as <applicable policy> and people who would want consistency in editorial policy are seen as petulant children.

No such thing as "unbiased source".

haggling over wording

legitimacy of wikipedia and its governance.

Notability and notability due to notability (see:United States v. Cromitie)

Tension between the rituals and achieving the desired result.

Creation, modification and replacement of authority through power

Wikipedianism is a position onto itself, but it has a hard time inhabiting it's own space because wp:synth requires all perspectives to be borrowed from respectable sources, rather than allowing even very basic combinations of facts.

towards a positive ideological program for consensus reality.

ideological training is already a prerequisite for being a proper wikipedia editor. one must be familiar with the guidelines and forms to do extensive edits.

preference to see the status quo as neutral and good, both due to bias in editing, policy and sources.

banning of sources like breitbart betrays a commitment to consensus reality and empiricism.

based on some kind of empiricism, centrism and liberalism.

having a motivation to edit an article is considered suspect, yet, every editor clearly has some motivation. There is an established hierarchy of what are good intentions or not, which smells of ideology.

Wikipedia is not neutral or objective and is in fact an institution that promotes a POV in and of itself, which is political, as most things are.

"You construct a community of people [..] who are irrational, resentful and hateful and not like the [in-group]. We are compassionate, thoughtfull. and in doing so you exclude that group of people from the domain of legitimate political discussion through subjectification" The word for when you do this, for when you exclude a group of people like this, whose absence is assumed to be natural, is ideology.

It is not a valid argument to deny additions based on the idea that the addition is not normal or conform to the status quo or is political.

Reasons why content should not be allowed should be filtered through the rules and guidelines of wikipedia, which generally state that....

The meaning of signs rests partially in the cultural understanding that a general audience has of these signs(see:structuralism), however, WP:SYNTH disallows making such context explicit without a source specific to the context explaining this common context. In a way, this helps obscure obvious, but obfuscated realities.

sources to develop from:

The alternative:

relevant links:

  1. ^ "Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder)". Nitter. Retrieved 2023-06-10.
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