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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when some people misuse Wikipedia like this. This reads like an opinion piece, and belongs to a blog.

edit: from the talk and history, the term was invented by Wolin, but has found little acceptance elsewhere. I am all for adding this to Wikipedia once it becomes generally accepted. But not as a means to get there.

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It's not misuse - it's a political concept, described by Wolin, a well known and respected academic in the field most thoroughly in his book "Democracy Incorporated - Managed Inverted Totalitarianism": http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverte...

I mean, if this is misuse, you'd better nix nihilism, liberalism, socialism, and all the rest, as those are also just "opinions".

While all "isms" are ideas, the interesting ones are shared by enough people to enhance communication. Inventing new "isms" to market fringe ideas should be discouraged on this basis; it makes things harder to understand.

Doesn't sound like frige ideas to me.

How should this political theory be presented, in your mind?

Let the author present it however he wants. Wait for it to get traction before using his personal vocabulary on Wikipedia.

>Inventing new "isms" to market fringe ideas should be discouraged on this basis; it makes things harder to understand.

Yes, we clearly should have stopped inventing new terms around Plato's time.

I mean what's these fancy new -isms, like Anarchism, Marxism, et al?

If I say Marxism, I can skip the explanation. People know what Marxism is. It enhances communication.

If I say Inverted Totalitarianism, I have to explain what I mean by that.

Based on that, Wikipedia should not be the second step after an author invents a word. Marxism didn't end up in the Encyclopaedia as soon as Marx published. Useful -isms are not established by authors, but by people who discuss them.

If debate here is any guide, "Marxism" is not a well understood term than enhances ccommunication.

I don't know much about Marxism. Here, it's just a token -ism, as an example. Context matters of course; even so many -isms are ambiguous and should be avoided.

>If I say Marxism, I can skip the explanation. People know what Marxism is. It enhances communication.

You missed my whole point, which is that by your own standards, "marxism" shouldn't have entered the language in the first place, since in 1880 you couldn't "skip the explanation" and people didn't know what marxism was.

In short: that some terms are established and widespread is no argument against creating and using newer terms. The establised terms also began as fringe and unknown themselves. That's how language is enriched.

>Based on that, Wikipedia should not be the second step after an author invents a word. Marxism didn't end up in the Encyclopaedia as soon as Marx published.

Well the 11th edition of Britannica (1910) has an entry, a mere 23 years before the first use of the term. We are 10 year from Wolin's work (2003), which makes it quite comparable, if not sluggish compated to Britannica, given that they didn't have as fast tranfer of information as we have today, nor as easy a process of making new edition as online publishing offers.

>Useful -isms are not established by authors, but by people who discuss them.

Nope, that's a populist argument. Usually nobody discusses most -isms and philosophical terms but a small percentage of scholars, authors and intellectuals. Still they appear in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, wikipedia, and elsewhere.

I'm not actually stupid/suggesting a ban on new words.

I argue the new word should be accepted once it's proven useful. That doesn't start with the dictionary.

I don't think it's a matter of time or bandwidth; you can surely find authors who published at the same time as Marx and we're not in the dictionary 23 years later.

Also, note I distinguish useful isms.

There's nothing wrong with Wikipedia pages covering political concepts, this article is just a very bad example of how to do that well. The article is about something that is not a widely accepted concept, only cites the primary source that defined the concept, is at least as focused on arguing that the US (and only the US) is an example of the concept as it is on defining the concept, and reads like a political OP-ED written in the third person.

It would be like if the article about socialism only sourced books by Bill O'Reilly and was all about how President Obama is definitely a socialist. Even accepting that Wolin is more academic and respected than O'Reilly (I really have no idea), I don't think this meets the bar of encyclopedia entry.

So you would rather a Wikipedia that vets ideas for quality rather than simply recording them? That would make it difficult to research ideas that are both important and wrong, like the ones of 19th century messianic cults and Theosophy.

The problem isn't that the idea is "wrong", but that its not a notable enough idea to warrant a wikipedia page. Anyone can coin any term in a blog post.

Once I was disagreeing on the "fallacy" article in wikipedia (fr) with someone (I used to contribute), I created an article so that I could coined the "argumentum ad wikipediam" that says if somehting is on wikipedia it was true.

The other contributor made his point by pointing it is just an argumentum ad autoritatem.

Then I discovered that wikipedia was turning with NPOV (I had some fights) into an authority : the validation of a NPOV is made by a team of recurrent contributors who have bias (like believing that when someone claim to be a researcher in their page like them it must be true even if we cannot check the real identity of the person).

Every system of knowledge and cooperation tends to be plagued by the emergence of an "aristocracy" of self declared experts.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (Feynman).

On the other hand, for now WP is still sane you can still open a claim that this article is violating NPOV. Because that is the case.

Redactors will study your case you might even be winning because you are stating the obvious : it seems (in my opinion) it has nothing to do with an universal non biased knowledge.

Even if I had a grudge with WP that may back your claim, I won't actually agree with until you signal this article as NPOV.

Here is your entry point for making what is right : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view...

If you hate it, then get the article deleted.

But maybe Wikipedia itself is ruled by Inverted Totalitarianism? ;-)

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