From Talk:142.177.X.X. User:Juxo writes:
Please review Special:Wantedpages. Your articles are pretty dominant in the top 10 and I'm interested in what meaning have you reserved for words like:
- Done (is this a legal term of some sort??)
- Safe (something considered safe in developing countries will likely not be such in developed ones)
- ...
- But there will still be disagreements within each region. As laid out in glossary, I think that a faction says what is fair and what is say organic. Like political parties, they simplify the discussion and pick issues to debate at any one time. This is how they satisfy the various ideas of done, safe and evil faction members share to at least some degree, or they would not be a faction. So there's a formula or function we do not have yet, which establishes how you see what is "done" or what is acceptable to label "organic".
- Maybe a good policy is to deliberately NOT DEFINE such overloaded terms and wait until there *are* factions to debate them.
Reds? Greens Pinks? Blues?, are these some terms that only people who enjoy throwing bricks at fast-food restaurants and use the term syndicalised anarchism more then twenty times a day have in their common vocabulary??
Could we please stick to English that the majority of people understand, because developing Consumerium is not about feeling extrovert elite-digi-intellectualism, but creating information tools for consumers
- Consumers do not see this level, it is just for reconciling different levels of trust in different sources, and concern about different kind of problems. If someone registers concerns about "Green" things (deforestation), "Red" things (union made), "Pink" things (sweatshop-free), etc., then they will get a personal mix of other concerns based on how much others who share thos concerns care about related things. Those who throw the bricks and use the term syndicalised anarchism will argue about the shades of it and register different levels of concern with different things. It is necessary to have this level, otherwise each faction goes to create its OWN Consumerium!!! Bad idea.
- Blues you didn't explain.
- Blues are globalization believers, those who read The Economist and believe it, or at least pretend to. Blue for sea, sky, the UN, and liquidity.
Faction: 13 links (position nro. 1 on the wanted pages). I think that I understand the consept of faction, but originally in my mind factions were something that would emerge in a self-organizing manner,
- To do bottom-up design we must change this name from "wanted" pages - in design you want the most abstract ideas to be defined later - they are not "wanted" at this point and it is foolish to be forced by wikipedia3 into premature def'n.
- You're absolutely right. Forging explanations of concepts too early can lead to slowing the project down because of hastily made up defs that make it harder and harder to do good defs in the future. Check out what I did on Reference. It's now a page just for tracking pages that discuss reference or sources of reference. Juxo 23:43 Jun 13, 2003 (EEST)
not by some developers dreaming up boxes we can put people in and then define what they are interested in and how they participate. I mean: just get the infrastructure available that tight or loose consortiums can start to form and let the consortiums define their (extended FOAF-style) relationships to each other...
- Yes, agreed, they will form bottom-up. But to help them form we must establish FIRST what complexity they resolve for us SECOND how we expect them to present their shared priorities to the system to help them prioritize themselves and THIRD what parts of our own glossary are up to them not us to define. is also not up to us to tell them they need a consortium form or should just let people self-identify as say "Greens" and then list their concerns. If this leads to a concept of "Green" different from Greenpeace or Green Parties that is an audit issue we can deal with later. We need just this vague colour spectrum indicator to help those with similar values form a self-image useful to link up with other groups "outside".
Abe Sokolov on the wikien-l list writes:
- "The "red faction" isn't a vandalism problem, but an example of mutual misperception and misjudgment breeding conflict and hostility. On a more practical note, the persistence of the "red faction" in regenerating itself over and over again (almost like Lir and his many incarnations) makes it clear that banning this user, or attempting to chase him away and make him feel unwelcome, are crude, self-defeating solutions. Since the Wiki mailing list is libertarian country, I'll say that it's like slapping on price controls to curb inflation. Or perhaps putting a bandage on a leaking dam. In other words, it's an unworkable straitjacket that will only confound the problem."
This suggests Sokolov understands enough about the issues to help work out features of a faction system here, and identify factionally defined terms.
Also re: Wikipedia Red Faction is Daniel Mayer's comment "Wikipedia breaking up into factions is a very, very bad idea." [1] This should prove to all espousing the New Troll point of view that it is in fact a very good idea, as Mayer is the most notorious sysop vandalism advocate and the source of most Wikimedia corruption according to some.
Timing: when do we have to block IP of our first non-simple vandal? Liar, bully, bigot, paid provocateur? That's when we have to make decisions:
- Issue: figuring out what these "bad things" mean is controversial, and seems to label people rather than behaviour or specific incidents or posts
- position: Assigning labels to individuals is damaging to creative discussion
- argument: Not every post is associated with an "individual", and no individual leads their whole life online, and certainly not in this forum - there are some forms of creative discussion that simply belong somewhere else
- position: Assigning labels to individuals happens anyway: Vandals and Trolls get named that by other people. Or get called "anti-Semite" or "thug" or "liar" or something. There is no clear way for them to adopt any other more accurate or expressive label.
- argument: a faction lets someone be labelled, but it also lets them change that label, and decide who they see themselves as accountable to, where social inclusion is at issue
- position: Assigning labels to individuals is damaging to creative discussion
- Issue: the roles of factions in simplifying and focusing common arguments
- position: Self-applying labels so as to identify with a faction that holds a well defined viewpoint is productive, as it saves time re-explaining well defined concepts
- argument: we've seen a lot of the arguments before; many are well worn and arise due to various differences in life experience and economic interests that are really hard to eliminate, and certainly won't be settled online here.
- argument: if we allow someone to identify the predictable and imitative part of their argument, that makes the creative and original part stand out, and it helps them identify whether better rhetoric or evidence already exists that would make it easier for them to make the same point - but that's up to them
- position: Identifying factions allows them to claim viewpoints as factional, so protecting them from sysop vandalism
- argument: this seems to be the default anyway as people gang up to resist ad hominem reverts - over time, people will notice that certain people who say what they think are reasonable things are reverted more often than others who say what they think are less reasonable things, and that will form factions whether they are acknowledged or not.
- evidence: multi-party representative democracy evolved in every country that tried to start with direct democracy or participatory democracy; it therefore must be assumed to solve some essential problems
- argument: this seems to be the default anyway as people gang up to resist ad hominem reverts - over time, people will notice that certain people who say what they think are reasonable things are reverted more often than others who say what they think are less reasonable things, and that will form factions whether they are acknowledged or not.
- position: Self-applying labels so as to identify with a faction that holds a well defined viewpoint is productive, as it saves time re-explaining well defined concepts
- Issue: factionally defined terms are often specifically chosen to created forced conjunction or deny the importance of major distinctions the "other side" sees as crucial, like denying "choice" or "life" as values in the abortion debate by trying to get neutrals to use a label which puts the emphasis on one or the other
- position: forcing all factions to agree on neutral titles is one of the great successes of neutral point of view. Neutral titles are good policy and make it much easier to find troll bridges.
- position: Consumerium:Itself can't expect to do any better than the people who devote their lives to dispute resolution and policy debate in the real world. For instance, you can't expect to achieve more agreement on what global sustainable industries are than say Green Party policy would reflect already - if they, who care about it and believe in it the most, can't exactly define it, then, it's irrational to believe that Consumerium:We can.
- argument: this terminology is weak, because the subject matter is new and difficult
- evidence: the difficulty of even just getting all Green Party policy and greenspeak in one place and up to date has prevented it from happening so far!
- argument: this terminology is weak, because the subject matter is new and difficult
- position: If Green Party policy really does help unify Green Party policy, then Greens at least could claim to "know how to do this" advancing of terminology. They can then try convincing everyone else to use greenspeak at least when talking about economics and industries. ONLY WHEN THAT WORKS CAN THEY CLAIM TO HAVE ANY EXPERTISE HERE.
- argument: this is actually one of the EASIER problems in factionally defined terms, since Greens take so much terminology from well known fields - they use terms from the w:list of ecology topics, w:list of ethics topics as is, whereas other factions typically try to just invent their own.