On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:49 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
This group, however fringy, is a very well organized professionally-run enterprise devoted to lobbying, with immense influence and a history of considerable success in influencing media, fairly and perhaps otherwise. We have not previously encountered any organization with its resources.
The Church of Scientology.
Even more of a problem on-wiki, Lyndon LaRouche's supporters.
It is entirely clear from the evidence that there was not a vast whatever-wing conspiracy here - the number of people contributing in the email threads was quite limited, as are the number of en.wp accounts which were IDed as being associated by edit patterns.
It is possible to handle the (signifiant and real) policy implications of such attempts to unduly influence Wikipedia without inflating those who organized the attempts into superhuman individuals or monstrous malign organizations.
We do not know if the CAMERA organization, as an organization, did more than let one of their staff look into doing this and host the email list. Even if they had, they are in fact smaller and not as rich as and not as well organized as other groups that have sought to do similiar things on and off.
We're not really much at risk from small off-wiki organizational efforts. What CAMERA could have pulled together if this got going seriously would be in a risk zone, where it's not a handful of editors, but enough that the pattern of behavior may not be evident unless you live and breathe that set of articles (if then). But if you get too large, then the pattern is easily evident again.
As demonstrated by the ANI response, if detected, such groups can be identified and characterized and rather thoroughly stomped on in short order.
We're equally at risk from anyone who has a clue how to create well-separated sockpuppet brigades. And we have many of those about.