Part of this discussion has me a little mystified, perhaps because I don't watch the right articles. Who is doing all this trolling?
As I understand it, a Usenet-type troll is someone who tries to stir up controversy for its own sake. As applied to article editing, that would be a "bad-faith edit" aka vandalism, where the troll knows that the edit is not making the encyclopedia better but goes ahead and makes it anyway.
Maybe there's a lot of this and I'm not seeing it, but what I do see is a lot of good-faith edits characterized as trolling. The edits may be poor or mistaken, and the person may be very stubborn in their defense of a bad edit, but if they sincerely believe that the edit is making the encyclopedia better, then it's inaccurate to call them trolls. For instance, a rightie who hates WP's leftie-ness can generate a huge ruckus by trying to "balance" what he/she perceives as slanted articles, but every one of those edits is in good faith, and the editor will think of him/herself as just as good and dedicated an editor as anybody else here.
The cynical part of me suspects that accusation of trolling has become a sneaky way to conduct content disputes - instead of addressing the goodness or badness of an edit, call the person a troll (especially if they become combative on talk pages), and try to get others to assume that all the person's edits should be reverted automatically. It should be pretty hard to prove bad faith without a direct statement of intent from the purported troll, perhaps if someone only argues on talk pages but never edits articles.
Stan
Maybe there's a lot of this and I'm not seeing it, but what I do see is a lot of good-faith edits characterized as trolling. The edits may be poor or mistaken, and the person may be very stubborn in their defense of a bad edit, but if they sincerely believe that the edit is making the encyclopedia better, then it's inaccurate to call them trolls. For instance, a rightie who hates WP's leftie-ness can generate a huge ruckus by trying to "balance" what he/she perceives as slanted articles, but every one of those edits is in good faith, and the editor will think of him/herself as just as good and dedicated an editor as anybody else here.
I absolutely agree with you. I find that the term "troll" means pretty much nothing, or it just means "somebody doing something I don't like." Even "vandal" is used by an awful lot of people for things other than "joe is gaaaaaaaaaay" edits, which to me are pretty much the only things I'd call vandalism. And calling someone a troll, or a vandal, or whatever, rarely solves the problem. It would be much more productive to be very specific about what the person is doing, and say "I disagree with the tenacity with which you exclude all but one POV from this article" or "it would really help if you told us why you were reverting all our edits" etc. This is much more likely to result in a resolution.
moink
Absolutely - the term is not helpful in combatting vandalism, as it has just become a term of abuse that is levelled both a genuinely problematic users and users with contentious but potentially legitimate views.
Let's try to focus on behaviors, and try not to label users. Mark
--- Theresa Robinson robinst@MIT.EDU wrote:
Maybe there's a lot of this and I'm not seeing it,
but what I do see
is a lot of good-faith edits characterized as
trolling. The edits may
be poor or mistaken, and the person may be very
stubborn in their
defense of a bad edit, but if they sincerely
believe that the edit
is making the encyclopedia better, then it's
inaccurate to call them
trolls. For instance, a rightie who hates WP's
leftie-ness can
generate a huge ruckus by trying to "balance" what
he/she perceives
as slanted articles, but every one of those edits
is in good faith,
and the editor will think of him/herself as just
as good and
dedicated an editor as anybody else here.
I absolutely agree with you. I find that the term "troll" means pretty much nothing, or it just means "somebody doing something I don't like." Even "vandal" is used by an awful lot of people for things other than "joe is gaaaaaaaaaay" edits, which to me are pretty much the only things I'd call vandalism. And calling someone a troll, or a vandal, or whatever, rarely solves the problem. It would be much more productive to be very specific about what the person is doing, and say "I disagree with the tenacity with which you exclude all but one POV from this article" or "it would really help if you told us why you were reverting all our edits" etc. This is much more likely to result in a resolution.
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On May 7, 2004, at 3:43 PM, Theresa Robinson wrote:
It would be much more productive to be very specific about what the person is doing, and say "I disagree with the tenacity with which you exclude all but one POV from this article" or "it would really help if you told us why you were reverting all our edits" etc. This is much more likely to result in a resolution.
The WikiCommandments:
1. AssumeGoodFaith. 2. WikiLove thy neighbor. ...
Peter
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