Not dead yet, just trying not to be overwhelmingly negative.

So yeah. Here I break silence with a request for terminology.

I don’t really like using the whole alpha/beta language for describing social hierarchies, equally because it’s not granular enough and because it’s so fucking cliched. Problem is, I don’t know of any other instantly understandable language that can be used to denote relative positions.

What I’m looking for is terminology that can accommodate a position in which one

• is typically sought to join in activities organized by other members of the group;
• and is able to successfully initiate and organize group activities on hir own;
• but lacks the necessary juju to tell a questionable group member to fuck off without raising the ire of more influential members.

An aside that’s not really an aside: A lot of stuff I’ve read recently in both the mainstream press and the nominally professional press suggests that we (”we” meaning roughly the kind of people considered to be exponents of the normative which is assumed by the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education) are expected to be both opinon leaders and eminently civil, where “civil” is defined as meaning “never making even a semi-private statement suggesting that an incompetent person is, in fact, incompetent”.

Shorter not-really-an-aside: The opinion-making literature for a certain class of people says (without saying) that this class of people should both exemplify and promote The Good without ever openly rebuking those who undermine The Good.

Yes, I’m drunk.

Indiana University at Bloomington’s campus IT department has a problem:

Even outside the current crushing financial situation, that wouldn’t be sustainable, right?

So they came up with a solution:

So, in a few weeks, the university will try something different: letting computer users answer one another’s questions. […] The idea is to open a Web site where students and professors can post their IT woes and share their solutions.

Except that’s sloppy reporting. Nothing new is being created; instead, an existing resource is being modified:

Indiana has something called the Knowledge Base, with more than 15,000 articles on just about any technology installed on the campus (even one on connecting an Xbox to the campus network). Until now, though, only help-desk employees could add or revise articles, which means the resource is expensive to maintain and not always up-to-the-minute.

And about that existing resource:

Though anyone can search the Knowledge Base (it gets about 18 million hits a year), the primary audience is help-desk staff members, who use it as a reference library when they answer calls.

Notice that the primary audience is help-desk staff members bit? Yeah.

So the thing is already getting heavy use[1], and the primary user group is the people who are being paid to answer phones. How, again, is this supposed to reduce the number of people calling in with problems? The answers to their questions are clearly often already there, the callers are either not looking for them or, having read them, still in need of somebody to walk them through the solution.

“If you build it, they will come” clearly doesn’t work. Why would “If you modify it slightly, then they’ll come” work any better?