The discussion is relevant I I would like to add my view. I come from pre-internet era, were we use to go to the big library and search into the dusty mayhem on the dewey classification or worst ones. The bio bibliographical section of one of such libraries was a nightmare for a untrained kid looking for information as I was, yet i cut my teeth on those.

I learned that any source of information has always been to be taken with critical mind. Once you do that even the most spurious is worth its grain of salt.

My favourite Encyclopedia is still the italian one, the Treccani, were most of the voices have been written mainly by scholar of XIX century tradition. Has been compiled in the 1920/1943 period (of italian fascism), starting as a private endeavour and finished as a national one. Is a great encyclopaedia, much less coloured by fascist ideology that you would expect. in total is a great achievement of a lost culture, with some precious signatures on peculiar philosophical topics. When you know what colour has the editor, if a work is well done you can “take your distance” from it if you need.
You never really rely on only one source, and you study bio-bibliographical references and cross them. This means that reading about a topic you find that some autors are quoted by everyone, some of those don’t quote each other, some passages are copied verbatim from one book to the next down the chronology. So you learn that you shall divide your sources in primary, secondary and even tertiary, and check from what kind of motivational background they came from. Sometimes the best ones for you come un-acknowledged, or are forgotten. You learn to distinguish between a source from the ‘50es neopositivist circles of Minnesota and one of the same period Berkley…
And you become aware you are also giving colour to what you report and chose to use of what you read. The more honest thing I learned is to state in advance your perspective: to say “I am a marxist” or "I believe in historical determinism” or I have such and such methodology of interpretation of my sources is an act of honesty and a tool to the reader to make his own mind.

We need to cherish and teach the way you can qualify a source of information and take distance to it. This is what I want to add to this discussion. It is one of the core abilities of “critical attitude” that we need to preserve ahead.
The foundamental toolkit to do so is the use of history.
"History does not compile”: this this is why it is so precious. it will always be a tool of criticism and never get you to a reasonably proven argument. Like in a gestalt image the point of view of History is as labile as the point were the switching of the two main shapes occurs; in that blurry between.

To go back to WKPD. The doers motivation Carsten well explain how this can be a colour to keep in mind: motivational and psychological: facts are that people are payed to monitor some entries, that some entries have a now-ist interest by from politics and some are prone to be exploited by fundamentalists. Also it takes a peculiar type of person to enjoy trolling on academic matters. Contemporary character of our mobile sources make different research, and we should keep this clear on the sources we accept as legitimate to do such. PLUS every selection of sources is ideologically motivated. In the case of internet is also economically and technically motivated, and these are knowledges-tools we must definitively acquire to our critical toolchain.

I like your example about David Bohm, because remembers us that fundamentalism is easily found also in the interpretation of scientific theories and, I must add, in the language in which they are written. Ask a mathematician about Bourbaki if you want to have fun, or a physicist about the meaning of his quantum mechanics formalism of choice (or some of us about systemd), and you will experience exactly what I mean.
Passion is not a limit for research, is a driving force; yet the predilection for one color should not hide the underlying image but enhance it, is up to the reader to take what he wants and try to compile on his machine.

Since most of our research is not done on the books anymore, walking in libraries, but is done in the muddy ever-changing "indexed by google” matter, we are even more prone in colour blindness and mistakes. And there are many more colors to consider, one click away, than we ever dream of 30 years ago. Both ways. Both on the colour of our sources and in the colour we willingly give to them. Once we know we take our sides and go on debugging.

And here I expose myself a bit and assert that the greatest of the western contributions to human culture is the Philological method. It is due to the fact at the core western civilisation failed already in the 3rd century bc when the Hellenistic civilisation was conquered by the romans, and some crucial information was not passe through to read them, so scientific method went fading away for centuries. and finally when all was lost (included the written language for more than 2 centuries) all had to be recovered. Information from the past was misinterpreted badly copied, transcribed, forgotten. And when science had to be born again, not only direct experience and technical lore was necessary. The maker had to try to make sense of a lot of crap, fragments, ideas, convictions, dogmas that simply could never compile together. The philologist and the scientist became one person (Newton, the alchemist, spending 20 years of study on the “true chronology of the flood”) and took centuries to be able to dream again what had been lost. And to go ahead.

What I want to stress here is that we need to pass on to the new generation we want to grow the hard core of scepticism in the right way. And that the right way is given by its Historical nature, is methodologically more philological that phenomenological, and grows into a toolkit that is useful exactly because "it does not compile”, producing active, curious makers with a good dose of skeptical attitudes harvesting free on other people’s codes. Few of those methodological abilities once are still available will form new generations of relevant thinking people.

So we should cherish and teach the method of “skepsis" and train with its tools in new ways.
I believe some of these ways were hinted by the hacker subculture of the ‘90es, that is personally closer to me. But also in philology of sources, in the haker/maker attitude to knowledge and in the historical framing of ideas. By this i mean to give to ideas -especially technical ones- a proper historical context and present them with philosophical depth.

I personally found that I like to introduce myself starting with Hakim Bey, as it was published in the subculture I was living by, with T.A.Z. and the acid colour of the cover of the book designed by “Professor Bad Trip”. With Luther Blisset, telling my listeners my stories. And immediately I add to them that I am going to lie to them, invent stories, adjusting the facts, to follow my reasoning. Not always only every once in a wile. I will be giving them them my true stories and forge them sometimes if I find it fit. I do this because reality is a narration, and a good story that moves and signify is better to me than a true one that paralyse and is design satisfy a young person hunger making him say “YES”.

I usually add that I will give them a very good mark if they unmask me.

f



> On 30 Oct 2014, at 09:33, Carsten Agger <agger@???> wrote:
>
> On 10/30/2014 08:25 AM, jaromil@??? wrote:
>> PArdon the ranty.scared tone here, but really nowadays WKPD seems a
>> Foucaultian nightmare to me.
>>
>
> I think that's probably the drawback of a do-ocracy as Wikipedia - the
> quality of the outcome entirely dependent on who have the resources and
> the passion to be the doers.
>
> And many Wikipedia entries are aggressively patrolled by people who have
> an agenda they feel strongly about. I once had a fight with one such
> editor over some critical remarks on the physicist David Bohm's "quantum
> revisionist" theories - the other editor was apparently a fervent
> disciple, and in the end he seemed to care much more about the contents
> of this random Wikipedia article than i did, at least he seemed to have
> more time to invest in the discussion.
>
> So I suppose: If we could muster an army of competent editors who were
> ready to mend the error of various Wikipedia entries' ways, would that
> even be the best use we could put that manpower to? I tend to doubt it -
> Wikipedia is important, but I find it dificult to see wiki editing as my
> life's mission.
>
>
> --
> http://www.modspil.dk
> https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/
>
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