Category talk:Technocracy movement

Some history

Many of the articles in this category have a considerable amount of common content (ie., particular paragraphs appearing in several articles) and many of the articles seem to be promoting the organization Technocracy Incorporated and its ideas. I have begun to take up these problems at Talk:Technocracy Incorporated and Talk:Energy accounting. Comments welcome. Johnfos (talk) 19:02, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

User:Skipsievert has said that "...Technocracy Incorporated and its program.. is perhaps the most important social movement of the 20th. century in my opinion..." and his user page states that "I am an advocate of the Technate design for North America. The Technate design has its origins in the Technocracy Study Course."

It's fine to have your own personal views, but the aggressive promotion of a particular point of view on Wikipedia is POV-pushing. I am concerned that Skips own brand of pro-technocracy views have unbalanced articles such as Energy accounting, Technocracy Incorporated, and Technocracy movement. I and other editors have discussed this extensively on the Talk pages of the articles and in extensive edit summaries, but we are not getting anywhere fast. Johnfos (talk) 22:58, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

In October 2009 I had the chance to raise some of my concerns here. Also in Oct 2009, various articles went to AfD:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Technocracy Study Course (2nd nomination)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Technate (2nd nomination)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Urbanate (2nd nomination)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Energy Survey of North America

Monad (Technocracy) was redirected by an Admin. -- Johnfos (talk) 21:53, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

User:Skipsievert blocked indefinitely, by User:Moreschi, for "massive POV-pushing", see [1]. -- Johnfos (talk) 20:29, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

See also: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive575#Attacks at AfD -- Johnfos (talk) 21:33, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

How to proceed

Technocracy may not be "the most important social movement of the 20th. century", but there is certainly a fascinating story to be told. An account based on the core Wikipedia principles of WP:RS and WP:NPOV will be much more informative and interesting than the heavily sanitised version pushed by Skip Sievert. The Adair thesis, written with the perspective of several decades distance, but at a time when there were still active Technocracy groups in Vancouver and other places, seems like an excellent starting point. JQ (talk) 09:33, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with JQ. We need to uphold Wikipedia's NPOV and RS policies. And use scholarly sources where possible. The last thing we need is for another pro-technocracy POV editor to come along and start spamming the pages with info and links from their website. (see [2]) -- Johnfos (talk) 21:56, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

A few years a go there was a group of us trying to get the articles (which even at the time were not all that good) to head towards something more academic and better quality. Unfortunately all that was stop due to the activities of skip and the articles just became his playground with his POV. Now that he has been banned I hope we can start working on theses articles again. I agree that we have a lot of work to do.

As far as sources goo, I think the bests academic references to the technocracy movement (especially in the US) are:

William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 (University of California Press, 1977) ISBN 0-520-03110-5

Henry Elsner, The Technocrats, Prophets of Automation (Syracuse University Press, 1967)

Raymond, Allen, What is Technocracy? (McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. LTD. 1933)

I would like to suggest that anyone adding material to the article should first read those sources and we use them as a basis for the articles here. For Europe, we have a bit more of a problem but we do have some newspaper articles we can refer to. We have one newspaper article in Swedish and the other article, in English, was publish by a newspaper that has now closed down. Isenhand (talk) 07:31, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I think it is healthy that we are each bringing different sources to the table. My main interest is in the history of the technocracy movement, and the most useful online source I've found so far is: Beverly H. Burris (1993). Technocracy at work State University of New York Press, especially pages 28 to 32. Johnfos (talk) 22:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Please include page numbers in citations to books and articles, as this will benefit readers and other editors... Johnfos (talk) 22:51, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Technocracy and the American Dream

I've finally had a chance to read this book by Akin, and enjoyed it. The book is clearly notable enough, on the basis of quantity and quality of published reviews, to have its own WP article.

However, Akin had little to say about Technocracy Incorporated and, given the paucity of reliable sources about TI, I think this WP article should probably be deleted through AfD. TI was formed in 1933, after Technocracy's heyday, and when viewed in historical context is probably less important than the Committee on Technocracy (based at Columbia University) and the Continental Committee on Technocracy (led by Harold Loeb), neither of which has a WP article. Johnfos (talk) 03:37, 18 December 2009 (UTC)