Little Tin Gods

OK, I just mowed half the lawn, with a conference call thrown in halfway through, and I think I breathed in a lot of pollen, so I'm not operating at full power here. Detailed information about the friend I rediscovered after so many years will have to wait a bit.

So in the meantime, I'm just gonna repurpose an email exchange I had with Michelle from mhryvnak.net/blog.

Gort and I have been updating NEPA Blogs lately after several months of relative inactivity. Michelle has been suggesting blogs and whatnot. As election season rolls around, a few politically-minded folks may decide to try to put a positive spin on their candidate online. Well, there's one place they shouldn't try that...

Subject: I thought this was a pretty interesting article...

Not necessarily a NEPA related article, but it still could apply here if anything thinks about doing it.

Whack-ipedia: No campaigning allowed at site, candidate finds
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5wiki.6496634jul10,0,316108.story?track=rss

Michelle

My response:

Yeah, I love Wikipedia's "bias" rule. I suppose entries on September 11 have to give equal space to the "controlled explosion from within" theory. Articles on terrorism must say something nice about terrorists for every bad thing they say about them. Wikipedia is a silly little site patrolled by dozens of little tin gods.*

I have no great love for Wikipedia. Sure, I reference it all the time because it's there, and more importantly because it often provides a useful jumping-off point for serious investigations into topics. But I find its pseudo-scholarly, faux-authoritative tone exasperating. Its "bias" rule is applied, like many of its rules, in an almost completely arbitrary fashion. It's funny to find an entry about a topic you're familiar with and then watch it evolve over time from something generally informative and correct to something almost completely detached from reality, presented in a tone that suggests it was written by a deranged ivory-tower academician rather than, as is more likely the case, a 13-year-old kid with a lot of computing firepower but no real knowledge of the subject.

This reminded me of something else:

Speaking of little tin gods...

I was following links to sources of information about the js3250.dll bug on Firefox - still my #1 traffic generator! - and I came across this forum thread.

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=169096

Basically...

Person A says "To fix this, do X." (X = "set a fresh copy of js3250.dll to 'read-only.'"

Person B responds with "How do I do X?"

The moderator comes on and says, "Person B, you must start a new thread if you want to ask how to do X."

Person C comes along and says, "Oh, person B, it's easy to do X. Just do this and this and you're done."

Moderator comes on and chews out Person C for being defiant and violating the rules of the forum by challenging a moderator's decree.

Pathetic. "Yes, I could answer your question, but you're standing in the wrong line. You need to be in that line over there to ask that question."

What fun.


*Where does this phrase come from? I know it from an episode of Star Trek, where Dr. McCoy accuses Captain Kirk of behaving like a "little tin god." Wikipedia is, unsurprisingly, of little help; at the moment, it lists three entries on a disambiguation page for "little tin god" : an African dance band, a Don Henley Song, and an episode of Highlander. At this time there's nothing in the discussion section for this phrase, but that may be because someone decided that the discussions weren't following the Wikipedia rules for discussions, and removed them. I've seen that done.

...hmmm. I've found a use of that phrase from 1959, several years before Star Trek came on the air.