>Nonetheless,
one difference that was immediately apparent is the fact that Violentacrez was
pretty much at the top of the volunteer heap >there: he essentially had
control of a large portion of their content, had permissions and accesses even
higher than any Wikipedia >administrator has, and clearly had direct
communication and influence with the staff of Reddit. I can't think of
someone who was equally >trollish having the same degree of access or
influence on any Wikimedia project. Yes, we have lots of loud people and
rude people and >trolls. But most of them are never granted adminship
(and I can think of only one or two who advanced beyond that point in *any* WMF
>project), and none of them have anywhere near the same degree of control of
content.
>Risker/Anne
It also strikes me that there was
another key difference: Reddit is owned by a large for-profit media
conglomerate, giving the staff an even greater incentive to let him be as long
as (as the Gawker article reported) he made their jobs much easier.
Paradoxically it would seem, being run by a non-profit and having volunteers do
almost all the work at Wikipedia that paid staff do at Reddit actually seems to
have prevented a problem of this magnitude developing.
If
this does remind me of any particular Wikipedia scandal, it’s Essjay ... and
that issue wasn’t so much about protecting undesirable content as it was an
editor who had earned a great deal of community respect turning out to have
earned that respect on the basis of greatly overstating his expert credentials
(granted, probably something that will never happen at Reddit).