On 11/27/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number of aggressively tendentious editors. These go well beyond the occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and effort.
Having them is just an indicator of the scope of Wikipedia; if you look back at all the prior Internet interactive projects of note, they have all attracted malcontents of various sorts over time. Success attracts them.
The question is what is done about it. The best solution I saw was benign dictatorships where someone in power just booted troublemakers, and was trusted by the rest to not boot good guys, and where social pressure functioned and kept good guys having really bad days from becoming troublemakers requiring the boot.
I don't think WP can do that; we have a form of that, but the scope is so large that it's not a benign dictator; it's a benign oligarchy, with its own internal politics and dynamics within the group and between the group and elements of the group and the "normal editors" outside the group. And it's not just a benign oligarchy of uninvolved people; the admins largely but by no means completely overlap the really active editors, which means that active editor admin / active editor non-admin conflicts happen all the time. The successful benign dictators I have seen stayed out of the day to day fray. We can't possibly do that here.
I don't suggest replacing the current mechanism; I lack any good concepts for a better approach. It's just a hard problem, by the nature of the project. It's probably going to continue to be a hard problem, eventually driving good people to frustration and exit from the project at a moderate rate. Avoiding admin burnout is going to be important over time.