[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia editing and Satanism: truth revealed

[Ian Woollard]

On 07/12/2010, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> What's with the top "award"? "1,000,000 edits and 15 years service."
> You'd need a time machine!

<realist hat on>

No! The top award in the Wikipedia is to be site banned. ;-)

The reason is that (pretty much) any large number of edits will
eventually annoy some people. Enough annoyed people will gang up at
RFCs and eventually kick off arbcom.

These processes *solely* list the 'bad' things that people have done
(where 'bad' is something that is somewhat arbitrarily decided by the
people involved and is obtained by a fishing trip through edit
history, picking out various things) and then they make a decision
about how *much* banning the person deserves. The accused are greatly
outnumbered and have no defense lawyers, and the process more or less
implicitly assumes wrong doing, and is highly selective about pulling
out negative edits from what can be an *enormous* pile of positive
ones, and no regard is even usually made about how things turned out.
For this reason, the more contributions have been made, it's actually
a bad thing.

The upshot is, most people can get banned eventually.

</realist hat off>

;-)

-- 
-Ian Woollard