[WikiEN-l] Featured editors?

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 10 Nov 2007 at 13:39:02 -0500, Marc Riddell 
<michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> on 11/10/07 1:26 PM, Daniel R. Tobias at dan at tobias.name wrote:
> 
> > A Twilight 
> > Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", provides a
> > fictional illustration of the tendency of a community to be its own
> > worst enemy.
> 
> That's where this comes from:
> 
> "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and
> fallout.  There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices,
> to be found only in the minds of men.  For the record, prejudices can kill,
> and suspicion can destroy.  And a thoughtless, frightened search for a
> scapegoat has a fallout all of its own." - Rod Serling

And, to make that episode's example particularly relevant, there was 
in fact an external enemy that wished to destroy the community in 
question; it wasn't just a figment of the imagination.  However, the 
technique used by that enemy was the very clever one of manipulating 
the people within the community into scapegoating and attacking one 
another.  This is a technique that works fine for trolls who want to 
cause trouble on Wikipedia, as well, whether they pursue it 
intentionally as in the enemy in that episode, or simply as an 
accidental byproduct of their other actions; I'm sure they get a lot 
of merriment out of getting Wikipedia admins to do a lot of 
collateral damage in the course of fighting the trolls' alleged 
activities.  If they play the game well, they don't need to do very 
much actual direct damage themselves; all they have to do is plant 
enough hints of their continued presence to cause massive witchhunts 
to be launched against them, dragging in innocent victims.


-- 
== Dan ==
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