Kesey article referenced in Wikipedia

M

Mike Dexter

Member
Joe's article and related podcasts prompted me to do some research on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Yesterday, I discovered a reference in this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo's_Nest_(novel)
to Joe's article under "Further Reading". Woo hoo!

I looked yesterday (with fingers crossed) to see if there were a "Further Reading" section under "Catcher in the Rye" on Wikipedia. There wasn't. But, today, there is one!

Further sleuthing leads me to think that one of our posters created the Kesey link in Wikipedia. Perhaps that person could also create a link to "Catcher" in the same category? Or perhaps someone else with editor's rights on Wikipedia?

I also see an opening for a link in the Wikipedia Flavian Dynasty article under "Further Reading":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavian_dynasty

These links could well help spread the word about Joe's work and Postflaviana.
 
J

Joe Atwill

Member
Hi Mike,

Thanks for this info. In the past all references to me or my work has been taken down within 24 hours, so it is interesting that the Kesey link is still standing.
It is outrageous that Wiki has no reference to CM, as it has been one of the best selling works of NT scholarship for over ten years.
What are they afraid of?

Joe
 
M

Mike Dexter

Member
The obvious answer is that they're afraid of the truth, but it's not quite that simple.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of so-called received wisdom. That might work for non-controversial topics, but where there is a possibility of propaganda, a different paradigm holds. The one example with which I am most familiar is the JFK assassination. The received wisdom, i.e., the truth of the matter as propounded my MSM, is that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. The majority of the public does not believe the official story, but the Lone Nut/Magic Bullet myth remains as the received wisdom. There is a similar discrepancy between the official 9/11 mythology and public perception.

It would seem that discussions about religion would be fair game. Is the Nicene Creed (for example) actually believed by a majority of people anywhere, including in the MSM? No, but there is a received wisdom nonetheless, and the arbiters of that wisdom are Bible scholars. The volunteer Wikipedia editors on that topic are probably either NT scholars or their acolytes. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that any references to CM are quickly expunged.

The link in the Cuckoo's Nest article has remained for six days at this writing. Joe's article is a serious piece of literary criticism, and does not fit directly under the CM heading. So the link remains, at least for now. Cuckoo's Nest was a controversial work from the beginning, so what difference does one more controversy make? One hopes that it will make a big difference to people who read Joe's article, but no difference to the Wikipedia arbiters who have the power to remove the link.

Along the same line, I repeat my suggestion that someone add a similar reference to the Catcher in the Rye Wikipedia article.

(Edits I have made to Wikipedia articles have been removed, including facts such as adding a book to a list of books published by a publisher - complete with ISBN number, etc. That's why I'm asking someone else to do it so that the changes are less likely to be flagged as "inappropriate".)
 
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Jerry Russell

Jerry Russell

Administrator
Staff member
The Caesar's Messiah documentary film has a line in the article 'Christ myth theory'. This would seem to be a good place to add more information about CM. I think we're basically in the "Christ Myth" camp, in that we would deny that any historical Jesus (recognizable as such) was the primary source or inspiration for Biblical Jesus.

Or, one could argue that "Theory of Roman Origins of Christianity" deserves its own article, as it has been advocated by a series of scholars who contribute to the notability of the topic by citing one another.

I think it would be tougher to get recognition for an article specifically about Joe, or about some of the newer ideas about Shakespeare and other literary analysis. In fairness to Wiki, they're supposed to be an encyclopedia (not a place for new research) and their basic notability criteria is that new articles need to rely on secondary sources.

If something gets taken down, that isn't necessarily the end of the process. Wiki claims that they run by a process of consensus among contributors. If any contributor isn't happy, there isn't any consensus yet.

Mike, I'm curious if you've had any experience challenging some of these "inappropriate" flags? Checking Wiki guidelines here, the guidelines for including external links seem to be extremely liberal --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links
 
Ionut Dobrinescu

Ionut Dobrinescu

New Member
It was me who linked a week ago Joe's analysis to the Further Reading section of Wikipedia article on ONE FLEW... The edit was under my username.

But when I tried right away to do the same for CATCHER IN THE RYE the spambot rejected my edit. I just tried again now and did it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye#External_links

Apparently Wikipedia doesn't allow successive edits of external references on their articles, by the same user.

And they are most of the time right: Wikipedia is nr. 1 referrer on Google searches, and we would risk to find all wikipedia articles linked to all possible blogs and websites and politicians and crazy evangelists, just to have themselves referenced via Wikipedia to Google search engines, by taking advantage of the Google Page Rank algorithm.

Yet more links to Postflaviana.org on Wikipedia would be a welcome addition. My suggestion is to just add the links to Wikipedia one by one, at regular intervals, and when removed or flagged as inappropriate, to ask for help here and go to support the edits in the DISCUSSIONS section with the Wikipedia administrators.

When you save your own new edit to a section of a Wikipedia article, you are always prompted to summarize your motives for administrator review. Always mention that Joe Atwill is a real person and author whose books are published on Amazon and whose interviews are on Youtube. This is important under wikipedia notoriety guidelines. I am sure that when more links to his articles and books are spread all over Wikipedia, and more wikipedia searches will return his name referenced in other articles (or Postflaviana, for that matter, if we may ever coin the term with them), he and postflaviana will most likely have their own notoriety pages there.

If Joe had more accademic credentials on display, he would be less of a theorist, but would surely have his notoriety page up on Wikipedia already. Now, you may agree with me that Joe is typologically linked to the allied characters of Chief Bromden AND Randle McMurphy: both hushing up AND crying out loud the truth, at some personal risk: to be utterly ignored, or lobotomized, whichever is worse. As in the novel, these options will keep each other in check right until the end of the story, which actually has no end, because the truth is neither revealed, nor crushed. ;)

Please remember that all contributions to Wikipedia are logged and monitored. Donating money to the Wikipedia project may also help your rating as a contributor. There is no better world wide web referrer to information, junk or gem, than Wikipedia. By all means, Wikipedia is a great learning tool. To some degree Wikipedia could be just part of something Kesey would have called THE FOG MACHINE, a recurrent parable of his, which I touched in another thread. Just take it with a bit of salt.
 
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R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Great contribution Ionut!

Do you think it would be a good idea to also control the rate at which links are added to hopefully "stay under the radar" so to speak? Or is all that done so under a computer algorithm that can otherwise be worked around?
 
Ionut Dobrinescu

Ionut Dobrinescu

New Member
The more third party sites contain links to articles on Postflaviana.org, the better the page rank of this site gets with Google over time. Google search engine crawls all websites regularly regardless, but will only return top-page answers if the page rank is good, and some other criteria are met. And since Wikipedia is such a reliable referrer, the page rank is increased if Wikipedia contains links to postflaviana which incidentally may pick up additional traffic.

Postflaviana visibility may also be increased by various SEO techniques, and the results can be analysed with Google Analytics (a special metacode must be generated and assigned to this site). It is curious that a google search on „Joseph Atwill” (a most likely search option) will only return a link to postflaviana.org at the end of the second page of search results.

BTW there is a stub on Joe Atwill at http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Atwill but the always correct Wikipedia defines Metapedia as a biased venue of „far-right, white nationalist, white supremacist, white separatist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi points of view”. Metapedia also relies on MediaWiki, a free and open-sourcewiki software but is not to be confused with Wikipedia.

In today's world "staying under the radar" is no longer an option. Some still use nicknames, avatars and alternate email addresses to log on to controversial forums and websites, but, as Snowden explained, NSA (the Matrix) has become so much better at meta-tagging users under all possible identities. Intellectual discussions and essays such as these on Postflaviana only receive a minor audience and even less thorough understanding, so why bother? Only 20 users on this forum, including the admin!
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Thanks Ionut.

I looked at one of the Atwill debunking links provided on Metapedia and it is rather disheartening to realize the burden we have even within the so-called 'freethinking' atheist community. Not one of these lemmings, including the blog author, has read CM and really understand the premise, but are instead willing to recycle each others' used Kool-Aide. The Matrix doesn't really have to work very hard at its craft these days
 
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