[WikiEN-l] the elephant in the room

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:16:11 -0400, "Daniel R. Tobias"
<dan at tobias.name> wrote:

>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.

I have heard this asserted before.  The problem is, I am unable to
identify the members of the clique.  Every time I think I have them
bang to rights, they go and disagree with each other about something
fairly significant.

Maybe it's a human nature thing: the tendency to see a conspiracy
wherever a group disagrees with you.  Or maybe there really is a
clique, and I am just very bad at spotting it.  Or perhaps there are
actually a lot of individuals, some having been around longer than
others, and some of their values overlap in some areas.

One thing Jeff Merkey said which I thought was interesting: in his
vision of Wikipedia, teenagers would get less influence. I'm not sure
if there is an age correlation (old or young) in the supposed cliques.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG