User talk:Foo-fighter

...since we've been at this together for over twelve hours: I suppose you could call me a mild liberal; I'm a member of the ACLU and the Union of Concerned Scientists. I haven't seen the documentary B101, and know nothing about the three schools. I doubt that Bucknell, being a non-crappy school, has an economics cirriculum with a leftist bias; I know that profession, and economics doesn't work that way; it's a science now (I would not be surprised if their english department did, however.)

I've spent a lot of time on college campuses, and -- let's be careful how I say this -- opposing a liberal policy for specious reasons is a lot harder socially than supporting it for specious reasons. The reasoning of most undergrads left to their own devices is usually of the specious sort. My feeling from nine years of being an outside observer of four different universities is that there are a couple of little despots in the classroom who try to enforce PC; when they cross the line, there's a fuss, the media gets involved and the trustees make phone calls. There are also a handful of administrators who like to play ideologue and thought police; again, the mostly conservative boards of trustees reign them in when they finally cross the line. For both the profs and administators, their numbers are small, were always small, and have been declining since the 90s.

Finally, each campus has a handful of super-conservative students, and a handful of super-liberal students; the first group get a lot of grief socially when they make a mis-step. I'd prefer it if the second group got the same treatment.

Thank you for the compliment. Take care, Sdedeo 23:44, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

(By the way, you may be amused by the debate that ended over the FIRE just before we started editing this article: . I've been wasting a lot of time on wikipedia these last few days -- time to get back to work.) Sdedeo 00:04, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

So you're an official Wiki editor? How does it work? are you assigned purview over a certain section, or do you just pick what interests you?

In seeing the FIRE description and the couple of times the Brainwashing page has been vandalized, that must be a lot of work!

No, not official at all, I hope I didn't give that impression. There really is no hierarchy on wikipedia. There *are* administrators, who have the power to "ban" people, but the bans are only temporary (most of them last six, twelve hours), and I've never seen them abuse their power, or even come close. Nobody has the authority to step in to "settle" disputes, it's pretty much up to the people involved to figure out what to do.

I just kind of wander around. If you look at your user page, you'll see you have something called a "watchlist"; you can add pages to your watchlist (click "watch" on the article in question.) When a change is made to that page in the last few days, it shows up on your watchlist. I forget why FIRE and B101 were on my list; probably I came across them related to the ACLU page.

Actually, vandalism is not too much of a problem. For a "major" article like the ACLU, there are probably twenty people watching it, maybe even more. Anything like vandalism gets taken care of within a few minutes (and the ACLU article is pretty much complete so the work is all done.) Probably a vandal (or just a sort of well meaning person who super super hates or super super loves the ACLU) hits the page once every few days, so it means I end up fixing the page once every month, even less.

For a less major article like FIRE or the B101 page, about currently less-well-known topics, there are usually a limited number of people who have an interest. For example, the person I worked with on the FIRE page had had a run-in with FIRE when they were involved with a case at Columbia. Generally, that stuff gets worked out once, and then it's done; personally, I believe the article we have on B101 right now is very hard to object to reasonably, and so anything new that happens is going to be petty vandalism.

In the end, I have about twenty pages in my watch list. Most of them are about pretty uncontentious subjects; I just watched them because it's kind of cool to see people take something you've written and improve it, add more info, etc..

The biggest problem I've encountered is with the CAIR article. You can imagine, tensions run high, and unfortunately, the article still has a "NPOV" tag at the top. It's unfortunate, because I think the article on CAIR is very good, very informative and should probably be the first place someone goes to learn about the organization. I'll try again to get the "warning label" removed, but it's tough.

Sdedeo 01:28, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

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Well, it is a very interesting system. I've been enjoying Wikipedia for a while now, but haven't ventured much into editing before. I like the ability to personalise the content, but it obviously has its problems. I actually think that my recent experiences give me more faith in the system than I'd had before. Maybe I've just been lucky to have run into someone like you who is a stickler but fair. Other pages might not be as well maintained.

Foo-fighter 02:45, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

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