On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:16:11 -0400, "Daniel R. Tobias" dan@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)