[WikiEN-l] Subject: Re: A modest proposal

[Durova]

> That means that you're clever enough to spot not just the obvious, but
> the reasonably subtle. The ones who are really good at it are the ones
> you won't catch. or do you assume that nobody is that good?

"We don't have to make it impossible, just difficult.
This is helped by the fact that most obsessive enough to disrupt
Wikipedia to that extent are not stable, sensible individuals."

All editing is a result of the user's cost/benefit analysis.  Wikipedia is
built upon the hopeful assumption that most of the people who take time
to contribute will act for altruistic reasons.  It reinforces that
presumption with some coding and policies to give useful edits an advantage
over disruptive and exploitive edits.  That's an average assumption and
based upon the site's progress over less than a decade it's overall a sound
one.

A few peaks and valleys occur on the ends of that statistical curve.  One
question usually posed by outside critics is *who in heck would devote
enough energy to become an administrator?*  I'd like to think we're
idealists and that opinion gets reinforced a lot among sysops.  Yet it's no
joke that Wikipedia pages about edit count also link to obsessive-compulsive
disorder.  Wikipedians tend to focus on the individuals who don't operate
within site standards and outside observers direct greater scrutiny on the
Wikipedians. Some of the latter scrutiny is logically or facutally flawed
and some of it reveals naive misunderstanding of how the site works,
which makes it very tempting for a Wikipedian to dismiss the criticism out
of hand.  I don't think it's all invalid; it's just very challenging to
parse.

At the other end are the bell curve are the long term vandals.  I propose
that most of these people are less effective than the administrators.
Whatever criticisms people may lodge against us (power hungry petty tyrants
who skip sophomore high school classes to pursue ideological vendettas), the
undeniable fact is that administrators have succeeded at working within
Wikipedia's structure while banned editors haven't.  Of course some long
term vandals aren't banned yet.  The Joan of Arc vandal operated for two
years before getting community banned, although thirteen months of that
occurred because I was new and it took time to earn enough clout to get
taken seriously when I presented my report and requested a siteban.  Many of
his edits got reverted during that time and he broke some more policies that
I documented to make it easier for the community to agree on the solution.
I'm tracking some other long term vandals quietly who've been operating for
similar time frames; it takes a while to establish a case under certain
circumstances.  Usually they're not very successful at getting their edits
to stick and they do appear to fit a similar personality profile.  They also
exhibit a lot of characteristic mistakes.  There are certain specific
reasons why some vandals last longer than others.  I won't outline those
reasons because I know my posts get wached, but the bottom line is the long
term vandals aren't much different from the ones who get banned quickly.

In the case of ideological or profit-motivated disruption - the two kinds
that are hardest to persuade someone to stop - sitebans don't need to happen
if the editor is wise enough to change strategies.  In less time than it
takes to engage in a lengthy edit war, a person could publish several
articles in a reliable small venue or get some press releases planted in the
mainstream media.  Then, quite legitimately, the editor could propose those
pieces as reference sources.  This is the most obvious of a variety of
policy-friendly methods for achieving the goals that otherwise result in
banning.  A successful editor is one whose edits become durable and whose
talk posts persuade the community.

-Durova