At 03:08 AM 5/7/2008, Relata Refero wrote:
On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 8:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We're equally at risk from anyone who has a clue how to create well-separated sockpuppet brigades. And we have many of those about.
Not equally at risk in terms of subversion of articles, I'm afraid. Individuals tend to have more modest aims.
RR is correct. We have sock farms, and possibly some deeply-entrenched sock farms; with sufficient precaution, they may be very difficult to detect, and, if detected, to prove sufficiently for present systems to respond to them.
However, there is no way that an individual can match what a group of individuals, coordinated, could do. Even a very small group, with sufficient motivation and intelligence, could basically take over Wikipedia, unless there are matching organizational structures in place to prevent it. Larger groups might be able to do it with less organization, and some think that this has already happened: all it takes is for a substantial group of editors to share some agenda and be willing to steadily promote it, and that agenda will quite likely prevail.
Essentially, open direct participatory democracies like Wikipedia (it *is* a rough democracy) have always been vulnerable to takeover by groups with a strong agenda; normal people don't want to stay up all night at tedious meetings, and normal people don't want to argue forever on Wikipedia pages. I've been doing some study of editing patterns, and there are some editors who are definitely not normal. Editing 18 hours a day for months and years isn't normal. Is this one person? Perhaps. Probably. But Wikipedia considers these editors to be the mainstay of the project, and they become administrators -- and more -- handily, as long as they stay away, at first, from certain kinds of offense of others.
Please don't misunderstand me. This is not a criticism of those heavily-involved editors. But it must be pointed out that heavy involvement can be a sign, sometimes, of some personal agenda. As I mentioned, small direct democracies, such as labor unions at certain periods in history, were vulnerable to takeover by radicals. The rank-and-file had families plus jobs. Some of the radicals only had the job so they could participate in the politics. That was their real goal. And they'd stay up all night if that is what it took to come to a point when enough others had gone home so that they were in the majority.
There is an answer to this problem. But it looks to me like practically nobody is willing to consider it. It does not involve any destruction or change of core Wikipedia values; indeed, it would simply realize them more perfectly. Instead, what I see is a substantial number of influential editors who seem quite ready to move to a different model, an elected hierarchy. That's been done before, just about everywhere. Look around you. You can see the result. Does it work?
(Yes. To a degree. But it also creates oligarchies and relative inflexibility.)