[WikiEN-l] the elephant in the room

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 17 Jun 2007 at 14:06:08 -0400, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Joe hasn't pointed anything out, he's been railing about conspiracies
> in general, and two editors in particular, for weeks now, trying to
> invent ways to "get" them in some way. Unsurprisingly, these are the
> same two editors who are a particular focus of the WR cesspool, where
> he regularly posts. And you, Dan, have been doing much the same,
> though to your credit your forays into WR are often curtailed by your
> natural disgust for the loathsomeness of the general goings-on there.

Yes, the antics on WR do raise my blood pressure sometimes (I'm 
taking medication for that).  That doesn't mean that they don't 
sometimes have a point in what they say (when you strip it of the 
silly, nutty rhetoric they tend to encrust their points with.

I don't go for the conspiracy theories outright; I prefer referring 
to a "clique" rather than a "cabal", to get the connotation I intend 
to convey about it.  A "cabal" implies a much greater degree of 
power, organization, and pervasiveness than really exists; even 
English Wikipedia alone is much too big and complex for any single 
"cabal" or "clique" to control literally *everything* (even Jimbo 
couldn't keep his fingers in every single thing that goes on even if 
he wanted to).  An editor can edit for years without even running 
into any of the members of the clique I'm concerned with here, if he 
stays away from the handful of "pet topics" the clique members are 
interested in (leaving over a million other articles to edit).  I 
only ran into those people myself when I went from mainspace article 
edits to the internal politics of policy debates, RfAs, and so on.

However, in those policy areas, there does seem to be a fairly 
cohesive small clique of people who have a disproportionate amount of 
influence, and whose behavior seems to be practically immune to 
questioning.  This is not so much an "evil conspiracy" as it is the 
natural social-networking tendencies of human nature; people tend to 
form into clusters of friends, who help one another out and back one 
another up.  That's perfectly fine and healthy, except when it leads 
such a group to circle its wagons in defense of the goals of the more 
control-freakish clique members, as seems to sometimes be happening 
here.

-- 
== Dan ==
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