[WikiEN-l] What is a troll?

Fri May 7 19:37:42 UTC 2004

Part of this discussion has me a little mystified, perhaps because I
don't watch the right articles. Who is doing all this trolling?

As I understand it, a Usenet-type troll is someone who tries to stir
up controversy for its own sake.  As applied to article editing, that
would be a "bad-faith edit" aka vandalism, where the troll knows that
the edit is not making the encyclopedia better but goes ahead and
makes it anyway.

Maybe there's a lot of this and I'm not seeing it, but what I do see
is a lot of good-faith edits characterized as trolling. The edits may
be poor or mistaken, and the person may be very stubborn in their
defense of a bad edit, but if they sincerely believe that the edit
is making the encyclopedia better, then it's inaccurate to call them
trolls. For instance, a rightie who hates WP's leftie-ness can
generate a huge ruckus by trying to "balance" what he/she perceives
as slanted articles, but every one of those edits is in good faith,
and the editor will think of him/herself as just as good and
dedicated an editor as anybody else here.

The cynical part of me suspects that accusation of trolling has
become a sneaky way to conduct content disputes - instead of
addressing the goodness or badness of an edit, call the person a
troll (especially if they become combative on talk pages), and try
to get others to assume that all the person's edits should be reverted
automatically. It should be pretty hard to prove bad faith without a
direct statement of intent from the purported troll, perhaps if
someone only argues on talk pages but never edits articles.

Stan