on 6/17/07 6:43 PM, K P at kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/17/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
On 17 Jun 2007 at 14:06:08 -0400, jayjg jayjg99@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@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
Well, common sense and the willingness of one lone wolf admin to spend 5 hours or reading vitriole and whining came to my defense rather well when I was being attacked by one of these cliques just this week. In the end, these cliques tend to be their own worse enemies.
KP,
I agree with you they can be their own worse enemies - eventually. It just seems to me to be another unnecessary obstacle an honest editor has to find their way around to do what we're really supposed to be doing here. You shouldn't have to wait for someone to come along to help you; there should be a mechanism for you to turn to. A person coming to the Project with an honest intention to contribute to, and improve, the substance of the encyclopedia, can eventually get fed up with the adolescent (bordering on the infantile) extraneous bullshit.
Marc Riddell