50011212 VI om
I don't usually post to this forum, but I'm beginning to see the occasional
sending which pertains to issues with which I have experienc, so I'll add
my voice here (without having seen previous discussion -- sorry about that,
I'll try to follow this thread as it continues).
apparently Matthew C Weigel <mcweigel+@cs.cmu.edu>:
>> Now I find myself facing accusations of 'being afraid of the Truth' or
>> 'having an image to maintain' for not accepting a controversial, not
>> entirely correct, and Sinocentric answer to the question ``What is
>> qi/ki/ch'i'' to replace the current (toothless and not entirely
>> correct) answer.
faq-maintainers in forums where ambiguities in the subject matter divide up
the forum's participants into factions (such as 'esoteric', 'religious', or
other, often theoretical, topics) are likely to be subject to a great deal of
pressure and misperception, even when they are attempting to remain neutral.
the accusations of which you speak here are common in contentious forums
such as alt.philosophy.taoism, alt.zen, alt.magick, etc. sometimes these
are used in order to argue for a particular perspective on the subject,
and sometimes they are intended to rattle the faq-maintainer or dispute
(ad hominem) the contentions prevalent or reflected in the faq maintained.
this is somewhat routine in alt.magick, for example, and regular
participants recognize the level of attention and interest which I,
as the maintainer of its FAQ and other reference files, bring to
the (volunteer) job. recently, with participant turn-over, we had a
number of people vie for attention by attempting to associate me
with nefarious purposes, exceeding bias, and argued that they should
be maintaining the FAQ in my stead.
I thought my response was valuably conservative. having previously
ignored the newcomers as trolls (attempting to draw attention to
themselves for no reason other than for the attention), I noticed
they initiated a discussion about the FAQ in the newsgroup, so I
suspended all my killfiles and fully participated in the discussion,
affording all those posting to the numerous threads that proliferated
to the group an equal voice where my ear was concerned and quite a
bit of respect (ignoring their past behaviour rather completely).
over time it became obvious, with a few invitations to those who were
causing trouble, that they wanted nothing more than to address their
delusions and get attentions from those who knew little better than
they about the history of the group, its volunteers, or principles.
even so, I crafted a revision of the FAQ based on some of their more
cogent criticisms and presented this before the newsgroup (with NO
response -- nobody was really interested in the discussion or serious
revisions, it turned out).
as discussion about the FAQs subsided, I reinstituted my killfiles of
the individuals causing trouble and watched for other regular participant
contributions on the matter, providing these greater emphasis in my
attentions.
where your situation is concerned, I suggest that you not worry too
much about being accused of things like "being afraid of the Truth"
or "having an image to maintain", and instead consider what it is
that your FAQ is intended to achieve. if you wish to include a quite
specific perspective in the file, then make this plain within its
introduction and complaints will have no basis. if you wish to attempt
to 'cover' the subject entire, then consider including all perspectives
which make themselves known in the newsgroup, regardless of whether
they conform to your preferences or those of any particular authority
(if not all possible or rational perspectives).
it sounds, when you talk about "a controversial, not entirely correct,
and Sinocentric answer to the question 'What is qi/ki/ch'?'" that you
have definite ideas about what is "correct". the standards to which
you will adhere in the construction of your reference document should
be stated outright, else you can legitimately be criticized for not
reflecting the variety of opinions about this very broad question.
I'm not sure what the value of "teeth" is in a FAQ, especially one
that is meant to represent a spectrum of opinion about a contentious
or disputed subject. there *is* value in having reference files that
might be called 'FAQs' which are strongly-oriented toward specific
opinions. these push forward important standards of knowledge and
sources of authority, which should, if possible, be specified within
the introduction, as I mentioned above.
Charles Richard MacDonald <cmacd@achilles.net.>
> Since you are not really happy with the answer that you have at
> the moment, why not include a statement that this question is
> controversial, and include all the explanations that you can find,
it was this exact problem that led me to proceed along the lines I
have in constructing what is now being called the 'alt.magick
noise-reduction FAQ'. since none of us could agree on the subject,
varying on almost every premise of the subject matter, I started
by constructing post-compilations in response to obvious frequently
asked questions (being a purist). once I had a number of these,
some quite lengthy, I created a FAQ document which, I thought,
fairly expressed the diversity of the responses to the questions
which were frequently asked, summarizing them briefly, without
much in the way of support or contention toward any specific view.
the result of this effort has outlasted all previous FAQs, in part
because it actually does address frequently-asked questions and in
part because it addresses them in a way designed to encourage
discussion of the topics in the newsgroup (dissuading arrogance or
at least ignorance on the part of newbies). you can find it at:
http://www.luckymojo.com/altmagickfaq/
along the way people have occasionally created what I refer to as
'Reference' FAQs (pushing a particular perspective), and these are
sometimes posted alongside the 'noise-reduction FAQ' and then
discussed as to their limitations.
in fact, since there were occasional criticisms of the FAQ as 'my
(i.e. biased) FAQ' that I was maintaining as a rarefied reflection
of previous compilations from regular posters, I created a Reference
FAQ clearly identifying it with me and as my alt.magick FAQ, very
much pushing my own preferred perspectives at the time of writing,
in part as a distinct contrast to the 'noise-reduction FAQ' I was
also posting regularly. this has been met with mixed responses, some
contending that it was confusing, others more assured that I wasn't
trying to 'push my Truth'. you can see what I created in contrast at:
http://www.luckymojo.com/namfaq.html
> including the parts of the persons answer that you "can" agree with.
I'd recommend including as much as possible unless you have some kind
of authority-standards you wish to maintain that are clearly stated
within the document.
nagasiva yronwode
nagasiva@luckymojo.com
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