Flying Trapeze
This has to be a first: over at Wikipedia, some guy want them to throw the book at me because … wait for it … I use too many links! (He’s also very angry because I asked Arbcom whether Campus Rape falls under Gamergate discretionary sanctions, when he thinks it’s obvious that it does. Okay.)
Now, lots of referees over the years have muttered to themselves that Bernstein uses an awful pile of footnotes and references a terrible lot of the research literature. Patterns of Hypertext has 76 references, Criticism has 93 – a lot for a 10-page paper. Still: if you need the references (or want a reading list), these can be useful. If you don’t, they do little enough harm. (Designing A New Media Economy has but 32 references, but it’s also got 18 footnotes, many of them fairly extensive.)
Let’s face it: links are perfect for this. If you want to gist or already know the area, skip the link. If you want more information, follow it. If you skip the link, fine — just don’t blame me for withholding information.
(I think the guy who’s complaining doesn’t understand that Google never indexes Wikipedia’s back-of-the-house, and imagines that I’m getting tons of traffic and page rank from Wikipedia. In fact, I’ve probably sent Arbcom a lot more traffic than they’ve sent me!)
Speaking of crowds, a hilarious new site, SeaLionsOfWikipedia.com, skewers the current Gamergate brawl. Here’s the latest installment: Sea Lion VOLLEYBRAWL, Part Three! Of Mops and Sticks. It’s very inside baseball, but clever jokes like the “+5 Mop of Banning” really help after an immersion in Wikipedia’s often-insufferable self-importance — especially when I’ve been responding with bombast and not alliterative verse. I don’t know who writes this site, but they’re funny and they really do understand Wikipedia’s back alleys.
Update! That was fast: if I’m reading this correctly, an actual Arbcom clerk has seriously proposed to topic-ban me from my own weblog and to place my Wikipedia user page under Gamergate Discretionary Sanctions. Because ethics? Cake on a rake!
(Meanwhile, if I’d only linked to Foucault, Haraway, and Butler, I might have saved Arbcom from the 4-credit course on Feminism in the Postmodern Era.)