Research on 危
Monday 27 January 2025My research into the evolution of the graph 危 involved more sources than ever before. In the final article, I was able to use only a fraction of the information I gathered.
The evolution of 危 is convoluted. It seems its origin was forgotten, its shape reinterpreted, and as a result, standardized in a way that transformed it into a new character. Even then, the meaning of the part 卩 or 㔾, although a later addition, was also lost and subsequently reinterpreted.
I first wrote it as a blog post and then made in an entry in my character database. Only the latter has links to the glossary.
The database currently still lives behind a login:
user: guest, password guest.
Adherence to the dogmas of Wikipedia
Monday 27 January 2025I read a thread on a proposal for deletion of an article on Wikipedia. There were two interesting things that I noted in the thread.
Firstly, the Wikipedian that wanted to delete reminded me of members of a cult, or adherents to a conspiracy theory. The psychology of people like that interests me, and this Wikipedian showed a lot of the behaviors that are prominent in CT believers. Currently I’m interested in flat earth believers as subjects that display very clearly important problematic aspects in behavior and thinking, that, I theorize, ultimately we all share. Maybe deletionists are interesting subjects as well, as they leave a trail in their deletion discussions.
Secondly, the tension between the users of Wikipedia and Wikipedia’s editors. The users simply want useful information. However, the editors of Wikipedia have to subscribe to a set of dogmas that they think will help them achieve some kind of ideal encyclopedia that in fact no user wants.
The text below I wrote because I felt for the ordinary users in the thread who had no idea what they were up against. Perhaps I will share it, for now I put it here.
[The Wikipedian who wants to delete] is simply the product of the culture of Wikipedia. The two primary holy dogmas of Wikipedia are: “Notability” (some VIP must have published secondary literature on the topic) and “Don’t do research” (this means that primary sources are verboten). This has little to do with being an encyclopedia: real encyclopedias publish articles that are written by invited experts that often sign those articles with their names.
If the two holy dogmas of Wikipedia were applied wholly and all the time, I’d expect that Wikipedia would become simply a directory of pointers to books and articles by VIPs. Perhaps since this is too obviously undesirable, this results in a tension between writing articles with actual information and deleting articles that violate the two primary dogmas. In my personal experience a lot of articles on Wikipedia end up looking as if they contain information, but in fact leave me totally unsatisfied (at best I can find references to articles or books that contain more substantive information).
So why is a lot of Wikipedia still useful, apart from its directory function? My first guess is that users expect and demand more. Wikipedians might be hesitant to give it to them, but often the reality of the value of usefulness might be too strong for even the most stringent deletionists to oppose. If a lot of users have an interest in a certain topic, deletionists might have a hard time. Perhaps that leads them to hunt for more obscure articles, that not a lot of people care about, instead? Maybe there they can indulge in their wish for purity more freely, erasing everything that does not comply to scripture.
Wikipedia is not a democracy. Deletionists have won a long time ago. Discussions about deletion are not about the number of votes, but about the question whether the Wikipedian who wants to delete can point to a sufficient number of violations of the dogmas. Usefulness is not in one of the dogmas. Bringing up usefulness identifies one as an outsider who does not know scripture.
This is one of the reasons that I am not a Wikipedian.
Possible alternative to explore (most have died already, this is a new one):