[WikiEN-l] the elephant in the room

[Marc Riddell]

> 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.
> 
on 6/17/07 6:16 PM, Daniel R. Tobias at dan at tobias.name wrote:

> 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.

Daniel,

Are there any defense mechanisms established in WP against these "cliques"
or special-interest groups?

Marc Riddell