This is why Trump is a genius.
The step 0 should be: never ever admin the mistake. Since you will look bad even if you admit the mistake: it makes no difference.
So you've made a mistake and it's public
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Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#12I like that. I'm quite good at apologizing, because I need to do it so often. I get lots of practice. The American abhorrence for admitting fault and/or apologizing is quite mystifying to me. It's really corrosive. I've spent 40 years, promptly admitting mistakes, and repairing, where possible. WFM. YMMV.
Perhaps this has to do with lawsuits.
I doubt it. It's a cultural thing, and probably partly a manifestation of individualism.
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#13This is why Trump is a genius. The step 0 should be: never ever admin the mistake. Since you will look bad even if you admit the mistake: it makes no difference.
Genius or psychopath?
I'm sure a lot more people would be successful with absolute zero morals - e.g. Hazing your young son for trusting you, as told by Trump Jr
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#14This is purely my personal opinion, but the wikipedia community seems like one of the most toxic communities on the web. The people contributing to WP - the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia. Perhaps the only area where editors are as zealous they are about creating obscure processes, is in policing what content should they should fit into the their volumes. Truly, it is a bureaucracy expanding to meet its own needs. One that attracts a certain group of people, who have a certain view of social interactions, that necessitates certain procedures for social interactions, giving rise to articles like this one specifically.
For the rest of us cooking up an apology from a recipe is feel insincere, an apology is a ritual sure showing how its done ruins the illusion. On a higher level this type of process-over-vision thinking has ruined the goals and ideas of Wikipedia, a site which in the 00s seemed world-changing and lead it to it's decline in the 10s and to what I predict will be its fall in the 20s.
I hope to be wrong about WP, I hope for a new wave of optimistic idealism to swallow up tech again, bringing about a new era of amateurism. But with the professionalisation of even the free software community I have, I must admit, all but given up hope.
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#15I like that. I'm quite good at apologizing, because I need to do it so often. I get lots of practice. The American abhorrence for admitting fault and/or apologizing is quite mystifying to me. It's really corrosive. I've spent 40 years, promptly admitting mistakes, and repairing, where possible. WFM. YMMV.
Perhaps this has to do with lawsuits.
Partly, but when I posited that, some time ago, it drew a fair bit of ire.
It's also something emotional. I grew up overseas, so I guess it never happened for me, so I sort of stand to the side, bemused.
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#16I like that. I'm quite good at apologizing, because I need to do it so often. I get lots of practice. The American abhorrence for admitting fault and/or apologizing is quite mystifying to me. It's really corrosive. I've spent 40 years, promptly admitting mistakes, and repairing, where possible. WFM. YMMV.
Perhaps this has to do with lawsuits.
You see this a lot in corporate land. Never admit a mistake because it is a liability when you're getting sued. You often see corporations offering compensation for something they did wrong while at the same time explicitly not admitting fault.
Even at the individual level you'll see advice like "never talk to the cops" because it could possibly be used against you in the future.
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#17Don't apologize.
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#18Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#19I like that. I'm quite good at apologizing, because I need to do it so often. I get lots of practice. The American abhorrence for admitting fault and/or apologizing is quite mystifying to me. It's really corrosive. I've spent 40 years, promptly admitting mistakes, and repairing, where possible. WFM. YMMV.
Perhaps this has to do with lawsuits.
I think it is mostly about ego.
In my country, lawsuits stemming from errors are very rare, but people would still die on random (mole)hills rather than admitting they were wrong.
I am myself very unhappy when someone points out a mistake in my texts, only in last 5 years or so I have learnt to be more relaxed about it.
Re: So you've made a mistake and it's public
#20This is purely my personal opinion, but the wikipedia community seems like one of the most toxic communities on the web. The people contributing to WP - the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia. Perhaps the only area where editors are as zealous they are about creating obscure processes, is in polic…
I think it's important to draw a distinction between mediawiki, the software, and all of its associated (GPL, BSD, apache) licensed ancillary software, and the administration and content side of wikipedia.
mediawiki is used by a lot of organizations for internal wiki stuff.