Wiki troll culture
From eg
This is for newcomers to wiki or zealots of wiki ideology who may find it extremely strange, as it reflects a more conflict-driven view of wiki.
The broad flat namespace plains of wiki have bred a different sort of troll culture than prior Internet newgroup, mailing list, forum and chat technologies.
While these relied on hierarchy and hard security to manage relatively scarce attention resources, wiki encourages fly-by users and lets pages proliferate such that small groups with strong POV may not interact with each other all that much until they come into conflict over a particular page both feel strongly about. There be politics as usual, and thus: trolls!
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[edit] between participatory and anarchy
Most wiki troll culture is an extreme participatory democracy in which creativity, e.g. troll names, and cooperation, e.g. trolls swap IPs using proxy, is recognized and rewarded (by evasion and continuation of activities including those that deeply annoy sysops). Some just call this anarchy, which for some trolls is accurate.
Some of this troll culture, however, e.g. SOLLOG, is more theocratic. When challenged regarding their motives and identity, true trolls will answer with vague/autistic/tautological statements like "trolling is!" or "we, trolls, will conquer" or "all your base are belong to us" or "let's t/roll".
[edit] trolling = dedicated trolls + fly-by trollers
Trolling, wiki-style, is an almost tribal sort of organizing where small groups work informally with their friends until a dispute arises, at which point, relatively complex dispute de-escalation, conflict resolution and mediation and arbitration mechanisms might need to be available on very short notice. The use of this word to describe those who are thought to post only to provoke is technically incorrect (that is a "troller") and (trolls point out) non-operational since it is not possible for someone in a conflict with another to act as reliable judge of how much they mean what they say. In such conflicts of course everyone will call each other trolls, thus all users are trolls regardless of who holds the sysop power, i.e. who got there first.
The evolution of wiki best practice and open politics in force owes much to these mythological creatures and their gnawing dissent.
[edit] evolution of Wikipedia
In a world of such hopeless subjectivity, some powerful judicial mechanisms have developed: the best known is Wikipedia ArbCom, founded by Florence Devouard (User Anthere) of Wikipedia. This remains a benchmark for wikis of lesser complexity and sophistication.
Trolls tend to revere Anthere for having set up one of the world's first troll-friendly large public wikis where trolls (without having to reveal their bodily identity) had a right to make a clear and rational case for their edits, as opposed to simply being told what was acceptable or appropriate by an informal sysop group.
At Wikipedia the informal process was and is often prone to sysop vandalism and other phenomena documented in an open letter to Jim Wales. While the authors of that letter seem to regard the word "trolls" as an insult, the more effective sysop culture jammers adopted it as a mark of pride and built it into an honorific, following the practice to reclaim labels used against blacks and gays. The name of one of the most famous pre-wiki troll organizations, the slashdot GNAA, honours these predecessor struggles, though the GNAA rarely or never engaged in any postings worth much defending.
[edit] advanced trolling
Today, the most sophisticated trolls have adopted the trollish lingo and idioms to describe what they are doing in very operational terms, so as to avoid the potholes of both old Internet lingo and regular English.
Some seek to form factions resembling formal political parties so as to adjudicate disputes, e.g. so that Marxists can judge articles on Marx followers and theory for their accuracy, rather than those unfamiliar with the material, before detractors can mangle them. The wikinfo.org project started by Fred Bauder using sympathetic POV was one of the first steps to such collectivizing.
Others simply seek to overturn power holders at large public wikis, but they won't necessarily stop there, the world trolling anarchization being the most obvious example: it seeks to turn the GFDL corpus namespace into the new DNS space, so that domain names dissolve and all content on the web is wiki'd.
