How wiki works
From eg
How wiki works technically is to simply make all pages subject to edit and discussion and page history review on an equal power relationship basis.
The laws of large public wiki were derived from only about five years' experience, so simpler definitions are required. A minimal, non-stupid, new troll point of view definition of how large public wikis work:
- someone unwisely registers a domain and puts a wiki up, stating a mission
- trolls with entirely different missions show up and add pages that are not clearly within the mission - troll-sysop struggle ensues
- sysop vandalism and vandalbots are deployed to suppress some factions that are considered especially noxious; sysops may block IPs
- troll factions grow stronger with each error by the sysop-vandals, pointing out the troll-formative injustice and recruiting those wrongly/unwisely targetted
- eventually, sysops realize that all users are trolls and that their common enemies are spam, vandalbots, sysop vandalism and "the community" - insist on participatory democracy norms
- if only a small faction realizes this, they may fork off or thidwick the wiki to pursue a new mission, at which point, the cycle repeats, with a few more users committed to trolling your own and eat your own dog food
See also: en: meta-wikipedia: Wikipedia Vicious Cycle, and differences with explicitly political public wikis.
