Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2006-08-15 Immanuel Kant

Mediation Case: 2006-08-15 Immanuel Kant
Please observe Etiquette and Talk Page Etiquette in disputes. If you submit complaints or insults your edits are likely to be removed by the mediator, any other refactoring of the mediation case by anybody but the mediator is likely to be reverted. If you are not satisfied with the mediation procedure please submit your complaints to Wikipedia talk:Mediation Cabal.

Request Information

 * Request made by: Amerindianarts 17:07, 15 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Where is the issue taking place?
 * ...Immanuel Kant


 * Who's involved?
 * ...User:Amerindianarts and User:Spinoza1111


 * What's going on?
 * ...On several occasions User:Spinoza1111 has provided paragraphs which are paraphrases of Kant's position and/or taken from secondary sources. They are never sourced or cited.  Several warnings about policy in regard to unsourced material or original work have not provided results.  Their substantiation usually amounts to reading the original text and 'common knowledge'.


 * ''What would you like to change about that?
 * ...New additions are to be sourced, inline


 * Would you prefer we work discreetly? If so, how can we reach you?
 * ... My user talk page

Mediator response
I've reviewed the case and it would seem there's nothing to mediate here. Parties do not seem interested in compromising, so there's nothing the Mediation Cabal can do.

To User:Spinoza1111: Please remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a philosophy paper. Also, please do cite your additions and try to work together with people; it'd help matters immensely. :]

Cheers! --Keitei (talk) 12:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

After review of the case, it would appear that User:Spinoza1111 is trying to circumvent WP:OR and WP:CITE quite unilaterally, and consensus at the article (and WikiProject Biography) has pretty much stated that his edits need to be cited and verifiable. In the future, should Spinoza1111 cause further problems, I'd recommend giving the AN/I lurkers a shout. Closing as this is AN/I territory and not a cause for mediation. CQJ 14:35, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Please reopen this kangaroo court. The blasted case was closed before I even saw it. Who do you work for, the Department of Homeland Security?Spinoza1111 07:47, 30 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Please see my comments below. I'm not so sure that re-opening this case would be prudent. CQJ 16:45, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

The following comment was made by CQJ to Spinoza111 and has been copied here for sake of following the discussion.

I'll reset the category tags to open. However, with that said, please keep in mind the following; I appreciate your comment in regards to my strict interpretation of policy, however, please be aware that for the most part, a lot of editors on Wikipedia are the same way. I'd recommend that you review the WP:CITE, WP:V, WP:CIVIL, and WP:NPA policies at your earliest convenience. In addition, my participation in this case is ended - and there is no further need to comment on the case on my talk page. Best of luck in your future edits. CQJ 14:30, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) I will not be the one taking the case since I closed it in the first place, and I prefer not to receive future messages in regards to this case.
 * 2) It may be several days before the case is taken due to the backlog in the Mediation Cabal.
 * 3) I will give one of the coordinators a heads-up and have them look and see what their opinion is.

Recuse due to previous interaction with Spinoza111, also I was the one that closed this case in the first place. CQJ 14:35, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Compromise offers
This section is for listing and discussing compromise offers.



Discussion
amerindianarts is trying to set the precedent that the text of Kant itself cannot be a source. This is absurd, although understandable in that many posters to the Kant site seem to start with the very idea that Kant "Kant" be understood, a common attitude in AngloAmerican universities. Instead, he's here advancing the proposition that all posters to the site should base their contributions on secondary sources, chap-books, cheat sheets and comic books. Anything as long as it is a "cite".

amerindianarts has already made his "case" by engaging in the vandalism of ideas on the site, the elimination of ideas without discussion by erasing text. His campaign is unilateral and based on a sore head.

Citing is out of control in the article because many of the posters haven't read Kant, it appears, and are trying to replace their failure to read or even attempt to understand Kant by a monkish campaign to make the article charmless and unreadable. Their anti-aesthetic despairs of anything like knowledge, whether their own or its transmission, and replaces this by an ersatz knowledge which for them has the overriding careerist virtue that it appears to be countable, and they can "win a pony" by adding cites.

From the start, amerindianarts made my "behavior", rather than Kant's ideas, the centerpiece of his case, which is a clear sign that he's a sort of mad mullah, to whom anything like "knowledge" is meaningless because of a core nihilism, and whose only satisfactions are in finding unbelievers, *farang* and *kafirs* whose human sacrifice will give him a temporary satisfaction with respect to the void at the center.

A CIVILISED online discussion, it has been apparent to me since I started participating in the Internet at Princeton in 1987, is one that starts, not with autos da fe with respect to the madness of the hour (such as boo hoo not enough cites) but with a presumption of mutual good faith, and THIS is a founding principle of Wikipedia.

Although amerindianarts is representative not of a personality but of a mob, he remains on an individual basis disruptive, a vandal and a troll, and his case here is without merit. He appears to be a part of misuse of wikipedia by careerist certification maddened graduate students which is DIRECTLY AGAINST the original philosophy of wikipedia.Spinoza1111 01:25, 30 August 2006 (UTC)


 * All edits I have made have been direct quotes from Kant, the history is clear. If you have read Kant, and your additions to the article have been from that reading, then why can't you cite it???  A very simple quesion that has been asked before, and you have refused to answer.  Why can't you cite your source?? Amerindianarts 08:14, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Spinoza1111 05:27, 3 September 2006 (UTC)Many specific points about Kant can indeed be cited. However, I'd like you to take a look at a quality encyclopedia of philosophy. In general, the article about an individual philosopher doesn't, in the manner of an academic paper, contain a great deal of cites of that philosopher, because the reader assumes good faith and that the philosopher's corpus forms "Cite One".

Spinoza1111 05:27, 3 September 2006 (UTC)Your sense of citation is in other words without nuance or structure, and citation is a unilateral demand. I perceive you as having an *idee fixe* set by the accusation that the article wasn't cited and contained opinion as a result, and you are focusing, without nuance or structure, on a one-dimensional goal.

Spinoza1111 05:27, 3 September 2006 (UTC)The problem with one-dimensional goals is that they are innately brutalising (your immediate move to mediation and presumption of bad intent on my part was an example of this). Their virtue for some is that they turn scholarship, and understanding itself, into a Fun Game of competitive one-upmanship.

Spinoza1111 05:27, 3 September 2006 (UTC)I have said it before. Philosophy, and the task therefore of the philosophical encyclopedist, is a matter of continual interpretation because there is a distinction between the literal interpretation of what the philosopher wrote and its meaning: Kant, in other words, is too important to be left to Kant.

A few things.

 * 1) Your last edit to the article in question was 7 August. The case was closed on 23 August. Today is 30 August.  What's the pressing issue all of a sudden?

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)I work for a living.


 * 1) There's nothing really to mediate in this case, and I'm not so sure that you want a mediator involved, especially with some of the past behavior involved.  Calling other editors trolls and vandals is in the face of WP:CIVIL, as was saying that I work for the Department of Homeland Security and calling amerindianarts a troll on the case page.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)This is nothing compared to amerindian's global behavior, which was to start a completely unnecessary war.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)The traditional wikipedia response to a good point (most of my points were IMO of course good to great), one that follows the "assume good faith" canon would be to ask yourself whether you agree with the point first, and, if you do, and you think a cite is needed, to add the cite. This is in fact part of the whole deal of a wiki. But I sense in nothing that friend amerindianarts says any opinion about the interpretive points made either way, ONLY a clerkish, if not monkish, concern with following rules that are all to easy to follow, and become for a debasement of wikipedia, *mitzvots*, plenary indulgences, and shibboleths.

This was cross-copied to my user_talk page and to your talk page as well. Have a nice day. CQJ 16:44, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) If you're that animated about having what you're writing as part of the article, assume good faith, use the proper citation method, and go ahead and do it. Be bold and do it.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)I beg your pardon. I don't give a flying fuck about having "what I am writing" "part of the article". I was in fact content only to ensure that, for example, the nexus between Kant, and mathematical intuitionism, appeared in the article.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)A global spirit now infects the article, and in that spirit careerists and gamesman are pre-empting new entrants with insider games such as CiteORama. This spirit is architecturally brutal, and brutalizing, because it overrides content and it causes the vandalism of ideas.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)In fact, the change in tone in Wikipedia is a dialectic in which the initial "freedom" threatens people and causes them to demand self-chains as did Odysseus' merry men off the Sirens' rocks. Which is fine, but should not enchain Odysseus. IMO, of course.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)But, in that this is a dialectic, and a return, not of the repressed but of repression, the returned repression is as we Americans say, loaded for bear. It creates an architectural brutalism in which discussion of ideas, for example, the nexus between Kant and Intuitionism, are replaced by monkish procedural concerns.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)In this context, my language is going to be vivid and appear extreme, for I am going to call a spade, a spade.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)I am relieved to infer that you do not work for the Department of Homeland Security. However, I would like to note an aspect of the dialectic of "openness": that the open system is open to massive infection by closed systems.

Spinoza1111 05:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)Take a look at Strawson on Kant. An article on Kant cannot be a dull recitation of "facts" but has itself to be a second-order form of philosophy. Mad monks, clerks, and intelligence operatives for the Department of Homeland Security have NO PLACE at the Kant site for this reason. IMO, of course.