User talk:Abd

Welcome to WikiIndex! We hope you will contribute much and well. You will probably want to read the help pages. Again, welcome and have fun! Koavf (talk) 21:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Disclosure

I came to Wikiindex because I was pointed here by Leucosticte. However, I'm not his meat puppet. I do not approve of his description of Nathania, as an example. Leucosticte is, however, not a pedophile, has not been charged with any sex crimes, but is a radical libertarian who tends to take up highly unpopular causes, in the name of freedom, and then he will present what are often rational arguments to be considered. He then appears to be advocating the cause.

Those attacking him here will continue unless stopped. They are truly fanatic, and they will attack anyone who simply tries to stop the attacks. On RationalWiki, for simply pointing out fact, with evidence, I was told to rape my kids. And I do have children, lots of them. And I'm in regular contact with the Department of Children and Families. The extremists within the anti-pedophilia movement openly state that "pedophiles" should be castrated, violently tortured and killed, and so should anyone who supports or defends them.

Nathan is right about one thing. Hysteria about this issue is rampant. It is obvious that some deep buttons are being pushed.

The question here is whether or not wikis regarding issues and containing advocacy that is widely considered horrific, inhuman, repulsive, something to be stamped out, should be covered here. And if so, how should they be handled? I'm obviously new here; however, I have long been interested in and involved in the wiki movement, I started my first wiki about a dozen years ago, and was on-line with the W.E.L.L in the 1980s. I do not necessarily have easy answers.

Whatever I'm doing here, I will stop doing on the request of any established editor, and would then consult site administration before proceeding.

The vandals and trolls (who may think of themselves as "defending children," but they are not, they are acting out their own hysteria, berserking) will attack, and it can be predicted to increase. That could be stopped by banning Leucosticte, but that would set a very poor precedent. Some of Leucosticte's work here may be unnecessarily provocative. He can be regulated. He is likely to respect that.

It is unclear to what extent WikiIndex wants to allow site criticisms and hostile tagging. I'm watching and hopefully learning. --Abd (talk) 14:24, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Having fun?

So, are you having fun at WikiIndex yet? I think the site has some potential to be a less biased and better-run (i.e. better-sysoped and -bureaucrated) site than RationalWiki and RationalWikiWiki, and yet could serve some of the same functions as those sites in providing coverage of the wikisphere and the people in it. The question is whether we want to limit pages here to just being a paragraph or so about each wiki, along with a template with a few useful parameters; or whether we want to give more than just the most cursory of descriptions. Leucosticte (talk) 07:30, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Weird that you would compare WikiIndex to those sites, one of which was a joke site about a joke site and is defunct, except as bits and pieces were preserved by you and others.

WikiIndex could indeed provide coverage of the "wikisphere," but the issue would be how. You want to do it with ad hoc wiki editing, "anyone can edit," which is somewhat natural, and doomed to failure. Didn't work in the WMF wikis, what makes you think it would work here?

You could easily start a site that is just what you want. However, your tendency is to mix a possible community goal with your own, such that your own personal and highly idiosyncratic goals dominate, to the extent that if you run the wiki, it's dead or trashed or both.

You might have done differently at Mises, I have not investigated. Did you? I would guess so, bcause you still have your privileges there.

And then you stick your tongue out at the courts and the parole officers, so that they toss you back into prison and you can't maintain your sites. "They aren't supposed to do that, it is not against the law to stick out my tongue." Except what you actually do is against the law, or close. And the law is not always fair. "Not fair!" is what kids say. They think it matters. However, the children's book that I read to my kids which has some kids saying that, had those kids be the troublemakers, they pranked the other kids, sat on their lunches, ran into them carelessly and said "Sorry!" when they obviously did not care, etc. Yoko's World of Kindness is the book.

A real ChildWiki would have resources by and for children and those who care for and support children. Your ChildWiki might as well have recipes for preparing and serving children for dinner, a Modest Proposal, and that is not far from what's on one of your pages. Mayonnaise. Everything is better with mayo.

To you, children are objects, pawns in a pseudo-intellectual game, "free" if they have access to guns, sex, and drugs, and "oppressed" if they don't. Nathan, that's really weird. That debate over "peace" on the ChildWiki front page, you report in the article here, demonstrates how utterly isolated you are, and thus how isolated any wiki that you dominate will be, unless you change your spots. --Abd (talk) 13:19, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

"To you, children are objects, pawns in a pseudo-intellectual game, 'free' if they have access to guns, sex, and drugs, and 'oppressed' if they don't." You forgot work opportunities! How will they afford to buy those other things, or to buy the things that are necessary to obtain them, without the right to work?

Mises writes, concerning the Industrial Revolution, "It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory." Don't deny the children their refuges! Factory worker at 7, manager at 14, owner at 21? Why not.

Alexander the Great died at 33; to accomplish all that he accomplished in such a short life, he had to start young. One mustn't forcibly get in the way of the fulfillment of youthful ambition, or youthful fun. From elementary school through college, I was always eager to throw the books aside and jump into the work world, where I could work on stuff that mattered rather than imaginary, hypothetical problems. I think many others feel the same way. Leucosticte (talk) 13:55, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

So? I deal with these issues every day, literally. You always could have tossed those books aside, unless you had abusive parents, and I suspect you did not. You were "eager," but something stopped you. Of course many others feel the same way, and there is a whole Unschool movement. What I mentioned to you Sunday was an Unschool. Not a School. Legally, all the kids who use that place are "home schooled." All that means is that they have an educational plan filed with the local Superintendent of Schools. My daughter's plan was written as being what she wanted to do. It came from her. What's really going to be interesting is next year, when we have the experience from this year to consider. She is frequently thinking about ways to make money. What can she make and sell? And she makes some really interesting stuff.

There is a normal transition that takes place between dependence and independence. There are laws regulating "child labor." But children can work, that's never been prohibited, it is merely restricted. Opportunities abound. Especially children can work in their own businesses, with little restriction. Compulsory education, it turns out, can be flexibly addressed, such that a child's business, if that's what they choose to do, is part of the educational plan.

If we believe that children are not free, then we react to that, and we see children as victims. If we believe that they are free, we can support them in exercising their freedoms. Freedom is always limited, it's intrinsic. That is, we are always free within the boundaries of, say, gravity, etc. Yet we can be free from gravity, in free fall. For a time. Forever in orbit or in free space, except there is no such thing as free space. Essentially, "free" is not a fact, it's a stand or interpretation. The interpretation you choose runs your life. You imagine, Nathan, that freedom is a fact, and you consistently point to lack of freedom. And so your life displays exactly what you see, i.e., what you interpret. --Abd (talk) 15:25, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

So basically...

Mark is saying that we should in fact have attack pages, as long as they're labeled "constructive criticism". Here is an example. Leucosticte (talk) 17:30, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

• That comment was not made on the page you edited, i.e., what you cite. It was copied there by Lumenos. The original edit was referenced as a page since archived, the present edit is on Category talk:Active administrators of this wiki/Archive 2008-09. It's just an off-hand comment, an idea. Bad Idea, I might add, though not Truly Terrible. It's just what someone might think up off-the-cuff.
• That discussion went essentially nowhere, and Lumenos' goal was to document the varieties of opinion among WikiIndex administrators.
• We have actually faced this problem, to a degree, on Wikiversity. See Wikiversity:Landmark Education. Key to the solution is that the top-level mainspace page was forced into sections, three were created. One was mine, one was Cirt's and there is a third for general community editing, as would have been the case before forking. The top-level page may be edited by the community, too, but the request is for rigorous neutrality there, which could require avoiding any controversy at all. Everything under my section is my responsibility. Others may edit it, but because that entire section is attributed to me, I have a natural right to control it.
• That right is not absolute. If I used the section for purposes that are contrary to those of Wikiversity, I could be stopped. Likewise, if Cirt violates policy, he could be stopped. He might actually be doing that, but not so egregiously that I need to confront it, myself, and, for obvious reasons, it would be better that this is entirely handled by someone else. What I did was negotiate that compromise with him. Cirt is famously combative. We had practically no trouble, it was easy. And he got to do what he wanted to do, document all the dirt. I can still comment on it on Talk pages within his section.
• However, whether or not this solution would work here, I don't know. Mark suggested a mainspace page for Constructive criticism of Conservapedia. Bad idea, and terrible name. As a Wikiversitan, I've become quite sensitive to naming practice that create huge messes. Make it a subpage, if subpages are allowed in mainspace here, or if not, then talk subpages. And don't label it Constructive criticism. Just call it Conservapedia/Criticism, and allow the creation of attributed sections, as with the Wikiversity resource. And if a user abuses a section, warn the user, and block if necessary, and delete if necessary.
• But I don't see from the discussion that WikiIndex wants to open the can of worms.
• Meanwhile, looking at those discussions, there have been issues here, before, see, for example, [1]. Proxima Centauri is a RatWiki user.
• See also Talk:The Conservapedia RationalWiki war
• Then, for actual practice here, related to this highly controversial topic, see

• Conservapedia
• RationalWiki

• What I notice is that the "help" for would-be Conservapedia users goes a little outside that mission, and goes into sarcasm. The RationalWiki article conveys little of the what actually goes on there. It's clear that the Conservapedia article is more critical and the RatWiki article less so. --Abd (talk) 18:21, 12 March 2014 (UTC)