Large public wiki
From eg
A large public wiki becomes a political wiki by default by ignoring politics and being taken over by trolls of some faction or other.
The largest and most political wiki is Wikipedia, where most GFDL corpus namespace issues and POV clashes over naming occur: literally millions of talk pages worth. Almost every troll organization shows up to participate.
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[edit] Versus explicitly political
There are also explicitly political public wikis that start as or with an overtly political mission, vision, point of view (parties, NGOs, advocacy groups, etc.). Usually a public wiki is only one aspect of a political initiative.
[edit] Versus small or private
How wiki works varies with its scale and user privacy: very large groups are subject to the same problems as large ones offline and may need participatory democracy or even representatives of factions to debate contentious questions using some formal mechanisms like issue/position/argument to reach any consensus.
Small groups may also however need these tools if what they are doing requires a lot of commitment and followup to avoid having to have someone lead/manage/moderate who is not part of the group. Some goal/process/audit discipline may be requierd.
[edit] troll-sysop struggle
Many large public wikis are rife with sysop vandalism as one faction tries to suppress others by simply making the wiki useless for their purposes, which may or may not be relevant to the mission, or requird to ethically execute it.
Wiki troll culture arose from this and other troll-formative injustice, for information defense, solidarity, and recognition of fellow-travellers: use of trollish and related idioms helps trolls support each other, and helps them combine forces to bite you on the leg more often/effectively.
[edit] Many attempts to explain
meta.wikimedia.org is mostly devoted to the problems of 'large public wiki, not just Wikipedia but every project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Laws of large public wiki by Craig Hubley is another attempt. In progress.
