![]() | This user is a WikiOgre. |
This user excoriates truthiness. |
![]() | This user is interested in the debate over the separation of church and state. |
![]() | This user strives to maintain a policy of neutrality on controversial issues. |
This user believes that "common sense" is a worthless delusion and prefers to argue using reason. |
![]() | This user supports the right of anonymous users to edit Wikipedia. |
![]() | This user primarily edits using the VisualEditor. |
![]() | This user spends most of his free time thinking. |
![]() | This user is a member of WikiProject Medicine. |
![]() | This user believes in being good. |
![]() | This user likes to use the thank button. |
1RR | This user prefers discussing changes on the talk page rather than engaging in an edit war. |
WP:RS | This user believes in using Reliable Sources. |
:-| | This user is undecided. |
imm | This editor is an immediatist. |
![]() | This user tries to be kind to you, and prefers you do the same. If I didn't, I'm sorry. |
IAR | This user thinks the best rule on Wikipedia is Ignore All Rules. |
ipa-2 ə | This user has an intermediate understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet. |
prog-3 | This user is an advanced programmer. |
math-5 | This user can contribute with proficient mathematical skills. |
de-2 | Dieser Benutzer hat fortgeschrittene Deutschkenntnisse. |
fr-1 | Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau élémentaire de français. |
![]() | This user is interested in law. |
BLAH | This user is interested in linguistics and etymology. |
![]() | This user is interested in medicine. |
Me
Things I like
- Adding wikilinks while learning about things
- Reading and summarizing books
- Increasing wikipedia's coverage of the sociology of profession, medical sociology, medical law and medical ethics
Work
Project: Medical sociology
Build medical sociology and the sociology of professions into something high quality and complete, that will cause readers to understand what actually goes on in medicine. This will help patients understand their experiences on interacting with health care, and help some of the scales fall from practictioners eyes.
Pages that I created
- Profession of Medicine Perhaps the book that solidified Medical sociology as a field by Freidson
- Eliot Freidson The founder of medical sociology
- Esther Lucile Brown Perhaps the found of sociology of profession
- Fitness to practise
- Special Allocation Scheme a scheme in the NHS to remove patients access to non-emergency medicine apart from areas with mitigation
- Informal coercion
- Acute behavioural disturbance
Sidebars that I created
Sidebars make me happy, because it feels like I create a unified understand of a field so that a reader can learn an entire topic for themselves
- Template:Medical law sidebar
- Template:Medical law sidebar
- Template:Medical ethics sidebar
- Template:Mental health law sidebar
- Template:Health policy sidebar
Pages which I made a (self-defined) reasonable contribution to
- Involuntary treatment (created sociology, prevalence, effects, prevalence, and coercion in voluntary setting sections)
- Medical sociology
- Psychoanalysis
- Controversies about psychiatry
Pages which I have made a smaller contribution to
- Vaccination policy (clarifications on theoretical nature of economic models, created section on chicken pox policy)
- Profession (wrote the section on the sociology)
- Public health (created the section on ethics)
- Medicalization (created the section on Healthism)
Task list
- More medical sociology authors
- More medical sociology high level content
Philosophical musing on wikipedia
Rhetorical strategies on wikipeda
The wikilawyer gallop:
An attempt to get someone to stop by quoting all the policies at them, whether they apply or not, insulting their intelligence, their writing style, calling their views and sources fringe and then repeatedly changing the policy you talk about they stop.
Thoughts on this: What do you want to do here. Any editor on wikipedia can block a change until you have enough people around to get get consensus. One approach is to reduce your attack surface. Trying to make a smaller change, try to argue for a certain topic being included, don't take the bate, practice assertive defense while avoiding attack.
What is wikipedia for?
What exactly is Wikipedia for? And why write articles on Wikipedia?
I am struck by how when writing wikipedia most of my activity consists of illegally reading textbooks and papers and then summarizing the content. Would wikipedia be better replaced by copyright infringement? Should people just read the sources I use to write wikipedia? What does wikipedia actually offer.
Here are some possible answers:
- Sometimes the papers are hard to read. Professionals often summarize in a biased way. Wikipedia has a broader editorship, so can produce less biased summaries.
- Wikipedia can be ahead of other summary sources in terms of looking at papers
- Wikipedia can be cross discipline in a way that other publications produced by an author from one field cannot
- Wikipedia can index material in a cross disciplie manner.
Part of my reason for writing wikipedia are selfish. Writing and editing on a topic is a good way to learn about a topic.
I have a complicated relationship with advocacy. I think a lot of the stuff about advocacy is made up - people who write on wikipedia are often advocating for a position implicitly. The question is whether this advocacy leads people to violate readability, accuracy, etc. I must admit I often start looking at a topic for "advocacyish" reasons, but stay for intellectual curiosity and editing. I also think it is reasonable to ensure that contentious issues are well-cited rather than merely "reflecting consensus".
Influence, legitimacy, and disagreement
An aim of wikipedia is to be seen as legitimate. This means readers will trust what is written on wikipedia. This is useful because you want people to read and trust you writing.
There are various ways to create legitimacy. One is to actually *be* legitimate, and perhaps demonstrate this. That is, things on wikipedia should be likely to true and balanced. Another way is to create a process that is likely to create these things.
One way of having this process is having people who disagree with you around. This is slightly perverse, since people who disagree with you are the people who are most likely to make edits that you disagree with, or change your edits in ways that you disagree with. But this disagreement creates legitimacy which is what you want - if you to have influence.
You trade off being able to say what you want, with being able to say a modified (and hopefully truer) version of what you want to a larger audience by virtue of legitimacy.
Wikipedia democraticizing truth
I would argue that wikipedia is part and individual that give individuals the ability to shape what other people understand as true. Such a viewpoint would seem at odds with the seeming objectivity of Wikipedia:DUE and Wikipedia:Verifiability. It's not about truth! It's about veriability and due weight! We are trying to represent the mainstream.
To which I reply, kinda sorta. Wikipedia democratizes the ability to define what is true subject to the theory actually being true. The "truth" that people are normally met with is a filtered and simplified truth, it is often out of date, simplified in such a way that accentuates the power, interest and agency of one group over another, that hides important details, that lines up with a professions "common sense", and that implicitly supports moral judgment and practical reasons. The truth that wikipedia provides is of a slightly better nature. That is, it is understanding of actual researchers in a topic, in different fields, viewed from many sides.
In a way wikipedia can be seen as stripping away the sociological and moral influence that can be applied to knowledge through professional education, by democraticizing and replacing the text book. Influence cannot be applied to wikipedia in the same that it can be by the author of a textbook (and by a body *through* the author of a textbook).
But why would the influence of "wikipedians" be less biased or self-serving that that of the author of a book. Here I would argue that ability to enforce neutrality or correctness is important. An editor cannot necessarily *enforce* their own tone or spin, but they can very much remove or contextualize someone elses. So wikipedia democratizes through by giving individual the ability to correct text and make it less biased.
A strange form of democratization to be sure, where your only act is to find justified critique and update it in line with the best literature. But then, why would you want to do anything else? You can't magically change the truth of the world to be what you want it to be. You can't make someone's argument less true by pushing it away, you have to understand it, critique it where it can be critiqued and see how you can act within someone else's truth. There is of course a problem where research will not provide you with the details you need to correctly understand a topic, and I guess the only solution to this is to become a researcher, or have ome influence over what researchers do. Probaly a sacrifice you are not willing to make.
Does this framing put me at odds with wikipedia's policies. Well firstly I would argue it is not my responsibility to do precisely what wikipedia wants me to do, rather I should act within the bounds of what is not detrimental to wikipedia. And what I have layed out here might be described as "what I am interested in my someone else". Amongst many wikipedians I do detect a certain overconfidence and alignment with the mainstream.
To parody their position, they would say that we are not experts and it is wikipedia's job to find the best sourcs and to summarize them to be consistent with mainstream thought on a topic.I would argue that in practice these goals are contradictory since the best sources with tend to *conflict* with mainstream thought because research moves faster than education and practice, and because professional and education bodies engae in a process of misrepresenting knowledge to align with their morality, understanding of the world, individual, and professional interests. In truth, most wikipedians are not trying to summarize mainstream understandings of a topic, they are implicitly undermining through finding the best sources and actively summarizing them.
The Wikiphone
Wikipedia gives its editors a large megaphone. It's difficult to not be aware of this. For all the people talk about wikipedia being an unreliable source for a number of readers on a number of topics wikipedia is fact (and this includes academics - though they are at times more studious about checkign their sources). Now of course, there are some wikipedia's who are completely unaware of this; who view the acts of creating wikipedia as similar to creating a work of art - that needn't be seen by anyone to be of values; and others might view this audience as more of a means to an end than something that should concern them: wikipedia is a collaborative project and it needs fundering and collobarators hence requires reach. But I am unconvinced, I think reach is large factor in many people's choice to be editors - and on a personal reach my one.
This reach comes with odd trade offs. Given that the wikipedia entry on a topic, is in many ways more influential than the front page of some newspapers, it is strange to imagine the situation that you could log into the New York Time website and alter the min page, and yet you can do that. How can this possible work. It works because the use of this megaphone comes with massive constraints. Have the words you write be considered authoritative and have a huge reach... in exchange for only being able to "speak" by quoting sources accurately and having large numbers of people be able to disagree with you and change your work if you are wrong. This in many ways is similar to the reach and legitimacy provided to professions, but the constraints of professional obligation are to some degree created through process rather than professional qualification. (Though it would be foolish to argue that reputation and the associated potential for bias in process doesn't exist on Wikipedia)
In this regard I would say that Wikipedia is an institution of sorts.
Big consensus
I think the concept of "scientific consensus" is a fallacy and a damaging one at that. This is not to say that the concept of consensus is not salvageable about the concept of consensus and it is not at times of value, but applied too broadly it becomes damaging.
Let's start with what annoys me. The tendency of editors and scientists and doctors and healthcare professionals to cling to this idea of what "should be true" and conflate it with what is true and filter content based on their own artificial idea of a consensus that does not exist. An imaginary consensus of what "science says" based more on biased, trust and respect than it is on fact. This is big consensus. Science is not monolithic and the consensus that exist are small, partly hidden and carefully fought. What's more these consensus will often conflict with big consensus, because big consensus is big visible and maintained by social processes.
The processes of wikipedia
The process of wikipedia is what happens on wikipedia, and probably too complicated to fully understand, but let's talk about a few of the processes that turn up whe writing an article.
Material dumping
Early in writing an article may mostly follow a single source because you are getting the material down.
A second coat of paint
Going through with a second source and adding context to the first source.
Painting all of wikipedia
Sometimes when you look at a source you find information that can be put in multiple articles as a form of serendipity. This is perhaps something that only wikipedia can collect
Sentence weeds
A particular claim can start "growing weeds" as the best sources both for the claim, and for providing context are found. this is more likely on contentious topics. But lots of topics are contentious for people. This can both provide great value, because overlooked and important distinctions are found, but also involve a lot of work without generating much content.
What wikipedia is
Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, and that is all... apart from it's now.
The global discourse community.
How do groups of people decide how you should think about things and what is important. Through lots of ways, but one of the ways is theory discourse communities. Papers that people cite, ideas that spread around.
But these communities and distinct, and forever changing, and each article a separate piece. Wikipedia combines and indexes these discourse communities and join them up.
An index of literature in sentence form
You can think of a wikipedia article as referencing a variety of literature. Indexing all the information in the world is hard, so hard in fact that the index resembles an encylopedia
Truth court
A standard for assessing what is true that is more democratic than academic published. Democracy does not generate truth, but the lack of democracy can very much *obscure and hide* the truth. Wikipedia acts as an antedote to this by providing a means whereby those who are motivated, and *follow a set of rules* can update the record of what is true. A democratic process can not decide what is true, but it can help highlight and correct what is not true.
This is very much "advocacy-like" in nature. But the ideas is that if the process of wikipedia are correct it can convert a number of motivations (interest, pedantry, ego, advocacy, boredom, loneliness) into easily accessible and well referenced truth.
A better referenced version of academic literature
Academic referencing and linking often sucks wikipedia is better.
Neutrality and activism
Activism can be damaging for wikipedia. It can produce misleading content that makes an article and wikipedia as a whole less correct. But those who have slighlty "activist" tendencies can also be more aware of inaccurate content, thus having people who care about a topic, and thing "conventional" understands are oversimplified (which they always are) can be useful. It can be slightly odd adding "neutrality" to things you write when you believe the activist interpretation is true, or adding nuance to existing text when you aren't that opposed to the narratives that underly the NPOV.
There are a few ways of doing this. You could be following the rules of wikipedia, making sure that others don't disagree with your text and revert things without trying to repair the text, you could be serving a narrative to truth and subtlety as more important than your particular opinion on any topic or theme, you could be making your material more believable by dint of being neutral and wikipedia as a whole being considered reliable.
I guess in my case I am sort of "serving the god of nuance" as the most important thing on any topic. Of course, this won't mean that my text will never contain bias (or should that be imprecise summarization). Though in practice I think more often than not my motivation is "ignore needless arguing if I don't really care about this".
When I'm picking an argument (implicitly) by editing other text which I agree with, it's more complicating. In this I suppose my motivation is more "lies always damage, and you never know which harm will be caused by the lie". I guess this a form of narrative agnosticism about where harm can come from. In my life, I have seen the peverse effects of "good intentioned" lies that play out on a large scale. On a smaller scale, perhaps some misleading simplification can stand, but as you increase the number of users, the amount of time that information is available etc, the more damaging imprecision becomes. So my opinion for wikipedia along the lines is "you think your narrative is valuable, but you'll never know this misleading fact feeds into someone else's narrative, better to keep the truth and adjust your narrative than the other way around".
Read/writing
As I edit wikipedia, I seem to engage in a behavior called of simultaneously reading and writing. I read things with the mind of an editor looking for clarity, I write things as a reader would read (though in truth I think the "writing" has more influence than the reading).
It's an odd activity, am i have my reservations turning all your reading into an exercise of improvement, though such activities clearly result in better understanding of the topic being read, and engagement in the reading process - for me at least.
Dumping ground
Summary of Ssasz myth of mental illness
Szasz looks at the historic diagnosis of hysteria and argues that this was a form of suffering rather than a mental illness and through this lens proceeds to criticize much of mental health.
He argues that the psychiatric and psychological professions gain status by defining non-illnesses as illnesses. He draws a distinction between disorders than can be identified through some physical of mechanical process and those that are forms of suffering. Ssasz redefines psychiatry as the study of symbols and their meanings.
Ssasz looks at the social setting of psychiatry contrasting a collective view of the medicine, where the physician represents the state and an another where the clinicians is an agent of the patient. He notes that within the psychiatric relationship both parties have some control over one another, the psychiatrist to commit the patient, the patient to sue the doctor. He argues that mental health can be used as a form of social control, but notes that one must distinguish between the act of curing the sick and the act of controlling the deviant.
Ssasz discusses communications through the language of object relations theory. He argues that one of the reasons for language, particular in infants to constructions of "objects", things in world that satisfy a need.
Szasz argues that it does not make sense to classify psychological problems as diseases or illnesses, and that speaking of "mental illness" involves a logical or conceptual error.[1] In his view, the term "mental illness" is an inappropriate metaphor and there are no true illnesses of the mind.[2] His position has been characterized as involving a rigid distinction between the physical and the mental.[1]