[WikiEN-l] Strange fetishes

Fri Mar 4 06:47:40 UTC 2005

Abe Sokolov wrote:

> Think of the warning signs that would alert one to the possibility of 
> groupthink… I still believe that most active users sign up to 
> Wikipedia with the goal of writing an encyclopedia. But over time, 
> their behavior is shaped according to a whole web of relations based 
> on the fetishization and ritualization of the 3RR and other policies, 
> making them lose sight of the goal of writing an encyclopedia.

The 3RR is purposely designed as a trade-off. On the plus side, 
edit-warriors inserting nonsense cannot do so more than three times per 
day. On the minus side, users reverting nonsensical edits cannot revert 
them more than three times in a day. If we assume that there are more 
"good editors" than "bad editors", then it's a good tradeoff, because 
there will always be other people around to revert the nonsense editors. 
Policies like banning repeated edit-warriors through an Arbitration 
Committee case are intended to keep the number of "bad editors" down so 
this remains the case.

(A useful analogy might be to the moral theory of rule-based 
utilitarianism.)

-Mark