On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 03:55:13 -0800, "Matthew Brown" morven@gmail.com wrote:
I think it deals with persistent troublemakers and the innate need some of them have to be recognised and noticed - and how we might learn not to reward them in ways that encourage them to do it again and again.
Yes, just that.
Mind, we should not confuse the verb with the noun. It is possible to troll, even quite often, without actually being a troll. "Please stop trolling" is very different from "you are a troll". We should be much more careful with the latter, whereas the former is arguably identifiable reasonably objectively.
For the people who cause trouble on Wikipedia, we have many better terms. Tendentious editing is in my view a useful term, describing a real and quantifiable problem with edits to content.
Guy (JzG)