[WikiEN-l] Recent goings-on

Tue May 31 17:09:02 UTC 2005

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> Expansion kills online communities. Fundamentally, eternal growth is
> a perpetual strain. We understand this from a technical perspective,
> but we don't understand it socially. We are continually wasting our
> breath and energy debating things that need to be slam dunks. If
> every Cranston Snerd gets this much debate - hell, if one Cranston
> Snerd out of 10 gets this much debate, it's a disaster. We're only
> going to get more Cranston Snerds. Just like we'll get more Lirs,

A Nony Mouse wrote:
> Expansion kills online communities because of people like Phil who won't 
> admit that they need to let go and they need to deal with the new people 
> coming in fairly. People like Phil who think that "shoot them all unless 
> they are exactly like us and make no noise whatsoever" is the way to go 
> about dealing with newbies.

Here's the problem:  You're both partly right.  Any project that becomes
popular will attract abusive users -- crackpots and kooks who want to
take it over to push their Time Cube, sociopaths and power-trippers who
want to dominate others, spammers who want to turn the world into one
big billboard, flamers and trolls who are there to fight with others,
and so on.

But it's also true that *because* there are so many abusers, long-time
users and administrators can get jaded.  It becomes easy to interpret
any newbie behavior that looks out-of-place as abusive conduct.  This
isn't unique to community projects, either.  The same is true in the
network security world:  because there is so much malicious activity,
paranoids take to interpreting any out-of-place ping as a sign of
imminent attack.

This doesn't mean that the jaded administrators and the paranoid network
operators are evil, malicious, or "rogue".  It makes them sometimes --
occasionally! -- wrong.

But here's the hell of it -- they're usually *right*.

Almost all of the behavior that looks suspicious is indeed harmful.

Most of the time, when someone portscans your system, they're not just
curious -- they're malicious, or a virus.  On Wikipedia, the amount of
vandalism, spam, flaming, trolling, and patent nonsense is astounding.
The fact that the community (and it *is* the community, not just the
administrators) are able to stifle almost all of it and produce a usable
encyclopedia project is equally astounding.

It is unfortunate and regrettable that newbies get bitten once in a
while.  It is regrettable, and we should each take steps to avoid doing
it.  We must assume good faith wherever possible.

But we can't ask that users (including administrators) assume good faith
*against substantial evidence to the contrary*.  There is a point where
we have to recognize that a person isn't just a newbie but rather a
troll seeking to disrupt the project; or isn't just an argumentative
contributor but actually a flamer who gets off on putting other people
down.

Likewise, we have to recognize that certain bits of evidence are going
to show incontrovertibly that someone is an abuser.  Playing at
sockpuppets or coming to this list with an email address that says
"wikipediaisstupid" are simply not things that anyone with legitimate
intentions is going to do.

We cannot, for the sake of not biting newbies, allow demonstrated
abusers to tear the project apart.

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>