Wikipedia Stuff
Yesterday I hadn't much to do in the middle of the night (as my sleeping pattern was a bit wrong and I was waking up at somewhere in the region of 1am). So I went back to my Wikipedia shock therapy article.
I hadn't had much to do with it for a while. It appears people are quite happy to leave me to continue editing it, as no one responds to my points on the talk page. However people do read it and typos or bad phrasing do get fixed within a couple of weeks, which is very nice. I also received my first bit of vandalism as someone inserted two typographic errors and an extra word, all of which were reverted before I got there.
I blended in neoliberal shock therapy into the article. It's hard trying to be objective about something I hate, but it's also quite helpful, and in the end the Wikipedia article is the first thing that comes up in a Google search on the term, so if I don't get it right, no one else will. It's such a controversial subject, so dominated by ideology, and if I can't be absolutely objective, the article will never survive.
In trying to explain the difference between shock therapy as I'd written it and neoliberal shock therapy as practised in Chile in 1974/5 and by the IMF in the decades of the 90s and 00s, I found this really short description useful: Neoliberal shock therapy views economic stability as a product of economic liberalism, while Jeffrey Sach's shock therapy views sudden liberalisation of the economy as a means to economic stability.
The more I write about shock therapy, the more I'm forced out on a limb trying to classify and codify the differing types of shock therapy and what people mean by them. It's scaring me as I seem to be violating Wikipedia's original research proscription. On the other hand, I don't think anyone has written an objective, historical and theoretical account of shock therapy ever, which is why I'm forced to make up so much in the first place, and I couldn't meet Wikipedia's various other prescriptions on Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and citations if I didn't. I can't see a way around it, and neither do the editors of the page, so it's a situation I've grown comfortable with and learnt to make do.
I hadn't had much to do with it for a while. It appears people are quite happy to leave me to continue editing it, as no one responds to my points on the talk page. However people do read it and typos or bad phrasing do get fixed within a couple of weeks, which is very nice. I also received my first bit of vandalism as someone inserted two typographic errors and an extra word, all of which were reverted before I got there.
I blended in neoliberal shock therapy into the article. It's hard trying to be objective about something I hate, but it's also quite helpful, and in the end the Wikipedia article is the first thing that comes up in a Google search on the term, so if I don't get it right, no one else will. It's such a controversial subject, so dominated by ideology, and if I can't be absolutely objective, the article will never survive.
In trying to explain the difference between shock therapy as I'd written it and neoliberal shock therapy as practised in Chile in 1974/5 and by the IMF in the decades of the 90s and 00s, I found this really short description useful: Neoliberal shock therapy views economic stability as a product of economic liberalism, while Jeffrey Sach's shock therapy views sudden liberalisation of the economy as a means to economic stability.
The more I write about shock therapy, the more I'm forced out on a limb trying to classify and codify the differing types of shock therapy and what people mean by them. It's scaring me as I seem to be violating Wikipedia's original research proscription. On the other hand, I don't think anyone has written an objective, historical and theoretical account of shock therapy ever, which is why I'm forced to make up so much in the first place, and I couldn't meet Wikipedia's various other prescriptions on Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and citations if I didn't. I can't see a way around it, and neither do the editors of the page, so it's a situation I've grown comfortable with and learnt to make do.