Troll-friendly

From dKosopedia

According to e-democracy promoters dowire.org, a troll-friendly political wiki "is one that is extremely tolerant of rude or aggressive edit behaviour, including anonymous edits. In particular, it restricts and removes administrators for applying technological means of control to anyone who simply seems to be challenging the dominant authority or major voices on that wiki." Probably compromising user privacy only for actual violations of law for which there are formal standing complaints with enforcement agencies.

According to this analysis, which is easy to find echoed on many large public wikis, "the use real names and no anonymous edit policies are not troll-friendly: they discourage input from passers-by while encouraging a pathology that is called the wiki witchhunt," a form of ad hominem debate. "Those who accept the label trolls usually argue also that reputation is bad and that all ideas should be acknowledged and debated wholly on their own merits." In other words, content over community.

Though there are supposedly also advantages to community formation: "It creates a more equal power relationship if all of the participants admit, on day one, they are trolls. A troll culture is growing in particular in the mediawiki space that began with open defiance of the administration of Wikipedia, but has now created its own venues, e.g. Anarchopedia, Consumerium, Wikinfo, to escape the unrighful administrative hierarchy created by people whose only distinction is 'being here first':"

"The distinction between an administrator and a troll is, simply, who got there first to register the domain and set up the software - sometimes not even that. Some trolls assert that they are more capable of making key distinctions than the administrators, some not. In the absence of any democratic means of letting the trolls run for the office of administrator, being troll-friendly is at least a sop in the direction of democracy. In any wiki where democracy itself is the subject, the trolls represent the unwanted or ineloquent public, and must be tolerated on that basis as a sort of bellwether." Consider also that "from the perspective of the professional politician, the public are often seen as trolls, unwanted voices impeding their progress over a bridge that they perhaps should not be on."

There are also "practical" rationales to avoid such policies: "Because the people who are not yet participating in the wiki are always, as a rule, more knowledgeable and experienced than those who are not, and because the odds of the administrator or founder being the very wisest person on the subject matter on this planet, a lively large public wiki depends on at least the possibility of ceding the key roles to a newcomer, one who brings the so-called New Troll Point of View, i.e. the emerging consensus among the dissidents who reject the administrative assumptions - or in parliamentary language, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition." The terminology of which suggests that the originators of the troll-friendly doctrines are likely from the UK or British Empire.

Source

• dowire.org/wiki/troll-friendly