User talk:JWSchmidt/Blog/27 January 2009

I like your blog. I hope you keep it up! Don't let that particular experience distract you from taking part in the wiki community. Sj 08:35, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your words of encouragement. Unfortunately, I am distracted every day by the fact that I am still banned from #wikiversity-en. "the wiki community" <-- the "wiki community" is very broad...I tend to participate most at wikis where thugs are not in control. --JWSchmidt 14:06, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
 * User:SB_Johnny gave the impression that this individual in question would be unbanned after a week. This appeared to be an outright falsity. Perhaps this dishonesty and the behavior of the user in question should be given a "community review". Wikademia

Wikipedia Disease

 * During the past five years I've seen drama at Wikipedia resulting from abusive admins conspiring off wiki, often in IRC chat channels, to impose bad blocks and bans on Wikipedians. When I spent years getting the Wikiversity project going I thought about how Wikiversity would be a different place where people talked out problems, openly, on wiki. Will Wikiversity ever find its way back to sanity?

What you are calling "Wikipedia Disease" has a more specific diagnosis. Calling it "Wikipedia Disease" is like calling it "Legionnaire's Disease" &mdash; it names those who are infected with the disease, but not what it is they are infected with. What they are infected with is Cluster B Personality Disorders &mdash; Sociopathy, Narcissism, etc. These are personality disorders that, in literature, are depicted as villainous characters. Half a century ago, these were referred to as dreadful people utterly lacking good manners. —Gastrin Bombesin 15:08, 25 February 2011 (UTC)


 * It might be useful to study the "natural history" of the phenomenon of "Wikipedia Disease". I suspect that the root of the problem was POV pushers who had long been active in other internet forums such as Usenet. Some of them discovered Wikipedia and they naturally tried to extend their off-wiki POV wars to the pages of Wikipedia. Those POV-pushers who held similar views as Jimbo and the early Wikipedia developers were tolerated and allowed to violate basic Wikipedia principles...they were "our kind of thugs", adept at keeping out of Wikipedia those who held unpopular views. A second important layer of institutionalized thuggery entered into Wikipedia when it experienced explosive growth. Before that point, there was a culture of welcoming new participants and helping them enter into the flow of the project. Early sysops were mostly mature and well-educated people who created encyclopedia content. Then a new type of wiki participant began to thrive, participants who were younger and mainly interested in being a "wiki cop". These participants formed a thuggish gang culture that was far larger than the earlier cadre of tolerated POV-pushing thugs from Usenet. Three main threads of Wikipedia Disease are thus 1) a core group of Wikimedia Functionaries who tolerate/encourage thugs who will abuse those who are advocates of ideas that the core Wikimedia Functionaries do not want expressed within Wikipedia, 2) thugs like the IDcab members who are willing to violate Wikipedia BLP policy and viciously harass Wikipedians who do not advocate the "correct" POV on topics like creationism and scientology, and 3) immature thugs who just like to play wiki-cop, deleting content and blocking vandals or any poor Wikimedian who is called "troll" by the Ruling Party. "Wikipedia Disease" is really a cultural phenomenon. There may be some relevant research that could begin to explain how an abusive culture like that of Wikimedia can arise and propagate itself. The question is, can such an abusive culture, in particular, the one forced upon Wikiversity in 2008, be removed from a wiki community? The internet is wide. It is far easier for honest wiki community members to shrug and leave Wikiversity than spend vast amounts of time fighting to return Wikiversity to its peaceful pre-2008 origins. --JWSchmidt 01:26, 26 February 2011 (UTC)