[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's administrative system

Sat Jun 17 22:58:02 UTC 2006

When I speak of edit count, this is metaphorical. 
I do not mean so much the actual edit count, but 
more so a hypothetical value, to force MMORPG 
terminology on this, we could call it "experience 
points", XP, that are probably better described 
as the number of people in your social network, 
as well as their individual "XPs". And admin 
privileges are just (massive) bonus points, that 
by themselves already require a large amount of "XP". 

Consider the process of becoming an administrator:
You simply need a lot of people vouching for you,
and other people will follow the lead. People
who you have fought in edit wars will seldomly vouch
for you, but instead call against this. This could
be described as "negative" XP. So a good strategy
(for becoming an administrator) may be to keep out of
controversial articles and instead make many small
and large improvements to various articles while 
building up this social network. People don't become 
sysop or anything for quality work, but for networking.

Of course trying to display the administrative
System as a single faction would be false. It is much
more cliquish, but every admin has his network. 
Once gained adminship, one is relatively free to 
abuse people at controversial articles - regardless 
of scholastic merit, since there is the clique to
protect him and decry anyone attacking him.

Consider barnstars - by themselves a nice gesture
and so on, it can be interpreted as scratching each
other's back, making each other look more well respected.
This concept of "Wikilove" has become increasingly creepy
to me over the years, to be honest. Eventually the 
administrators turn out to be an old boys network 
scratching each other's backs every opportunity by 
inflating each other's apparent XPs.

And not disciplining administrative abuses is just
obvious - anything else would award both parties massive
negative XP.

Compared to these XP, "being a great writer" or
"being a good scholar" regarding a topic completely fade
when it comes to a content dispute.