On 17 Jun 2007 at 14:06:08 -0400, jayjg
<jayjg99(a)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(a)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.