This post was submitted to the forum by The Review’s resident Gadfly, Dan Tobias.

The Wikipedia hierarchy (at least on en-wp), from lowest to highest:

• Bogeymen / Arch-Enemies / The Antichrist
• Very Banned Users
• Normal Banned Users
• Blocked Users (supposedly distinct from Banned Users, even if nobody can actually put their finger solidly on the definition of the distinction)
• Users under some limited sanction
• Users with some real or imagined connection to an Evil Attack Site but who are inexplicably not banned or blocked or sanctioned anyway
• Anon IPs
• Recently created accounts
• Established accounts that haven’t done anything, positive or negative, attracting the attention of the inside clique
• Editors with a high edit count, featured article creation, and other achievements, if they’re not too politically incorrect
• Admins
• Bureaucrats, Checkusers, and other users with superpowers
• ArbCom
• Ruling Clique Outer Circle (hangers-on with some friendship with the top cliqueistas)
• Ruling Clique Inner Circle (leaders of the sooper sekrit lists)
• Jimbo (though his influence seems to be waning, so he might fall off the top of the pyramid ultimately)

(However, the composition of those Ruling Clique Inner and Outer Circles is greatly in flux these days.)

Several months ago, a number of Wikipedia Review members joined me in a project to methodically enumerate one calendar quarter’s worth (4Q 2007) of edit data underlying the 100 Wikipedia articles about the (then) current United States Senators.

What we found was alarming at times. While most vandalized edits were brief in duration and clearly juvenile in content, a substantial portion of edits were plainly intended to be hurtful and defamatory against the Senators — and they lasted for not just minutes, but hours, days, even weeks at a time.

Using the Wikipedia page traffic tool, we attempted to interpolate the number of “page views” that each Senator’s article likely witnessed during the damaged edit. The damaged edit that saw the greatest number of page views before correction regarded Senator John McCain: “McCain was born in Florida in the then American-controlled Panama Canal Zone“, which lasted for over 3 days, under about 93,000 views where nobody noticed or bothered to correct this obvious error.

Read the rest of this entry »