Suppose I'd better introduce myself.

I've been vandalising Wikipedia (and various other wikis) for a few years now, along with a few friends in real life. I've also been improving Wikipedia through several legitimate accounts. My only real clame to fame as a vandal was to be associated with the person (a very good friend of mine in real life) who first put palpatine up on Benedict XVI, thus starting an internet meme and getting plenty of news reports, and a mention from Jimbo himself. We specialise primarily in complicated, persistent vandalism and trolling.

I don't care to analyse my motives, but an immature humour certainly plays its part. My name has two meanings; it signifies that I am an unrepentant vandal, but it is also a clue as to who I am. I won't confirm it though. I take a keen amateur interest in the psychology of groups, and find Wikipedia fascinating in this respect, in particular how it seems to draw in autistic, ocd, officious types, and how a bureaucracy seems to have grown up organically. Weber would have loved it.

How do.

I don't do vandalism, not anything that a normal person would reguard as vandalism, even to a Subway Wall as Wikipathetic as Wikipedia, since I bear a responsibility to my chanciest reader that transcends all other considerations.

But I do find group [sic]ology to be fascinating, all too fascinating, and Weber is the Max, the genius of these locos, bar none.

Vide GetMeta:Wreads.

Jonny

Are we supposed to applaud or something? Wee, you can make goofy edits to Wikipedia.

As someone more than slightly interested in psychology myself, I find very little of interest in Wikipedia, except to confirm my suspicions that any medium based on the mob will be ruled by the pugnus ignarus that pass for intelligentsia. It's no surprise that it's both admired and hated, but I use it to fill up empty time in my day and (oddly enough) try to learn something.

Whatever floats your boat.

The interesting thing is that you claim to do constructive work in addition to vandalism. Do you try to balance them out? Isn't it strange to try to build something up one minute and then go trying to kick it down the next minute? Are you mainly concerned with helping or hurting?

Well, both are fun. Editing is a solitary affair, whilst vandalism can be quite a social thing, a group of people taking over a corner in an internet cafe for half an hour, giggling like twelve year old girls. I certainly wouldn't claim to be actively trying to balance them out, and I'm not sure whether I am more destructive or constructive.

More interesting is the deliberate vandalism done by admins. The insertion of jokes into Wikipedia can only be an improvement.

Seems like EVERYBODY on Wikipedia is interested in psychology.

Why?

I'm not. But welcome.

Sounds like fun! And it's a good point, too - constructive editing has far less party-game potential than creative vandalism. And I would have to assume that after you've participated in a few WP-vandalism parties, you'd get a pretty good idea of what sorts of vandalism would make it less likely that you'd get blocked right away, thus keeping the good times rolling as long as possible!

Another thing you could do would be to have two teams of 3-4 people each, each using a specific user account, and the team whose account gets blocked first loses and has to buy drinks for the other team.

And why limit it to parties and internet cafes? Large families, church groups, or Rotary Clubs could get together and play the Vandalize WP Game as a group-bonding activity, or even for charity...


Everybody on Wikipedia, or on Wikipedia Review? If the latter, I'd say you're probably right - the study of community interactions, power structures and behavioral variance between users, admins, and groups thereof is really quite fascinating. Not to mention endlessly amusing... But on a more serious note, the fact is that people can be messed up psychologically by prolonged "Wikiabuse" and "Wikiaddiction."

The problem is that it's nearly impossible to study the psychology of anonymous online communities in a properly scientific way, because you couldn't trust the subjects to be giving you accurate information about themselves. You can really only do it through observation and anecdotal evidence, and maybe some general trend analysis. And there's no better place to do that than this website, in my opinion... Even so, where would you publish your findings? Uncyclopedia?

Nathan actually tried to start a topic on it a few weeks ago, kinda sorta, but it's not something people want to discuss in generalized terms, I suspect. Still, John Suler's website is about the closest I've seen to a proper study of the whole thing, though it isn't wiki-specific.

You wouldn't mind telling us where your quoting Weber from, would you? It's not
from here, is it?

Goshers, could it be that the sentence "Weber would have loved it" did not constitute a quote at all, and was in fact mere speculation on his part? And that Weber (presumably Max Weber, as opposed to Chris Webber, who was recently obtained by the Detroit Pistons in exchange for a contract buyout from the 'Sixers) was himself only quoted in the report by the US Commission on Government Secrecy, and had been dead for many years by the time this occurred?

I've found most vandals and vandalism on Wikipedia to be almost like vandalism on the Berlin Wall. Futile, symbolic of a greater problem, and indicative of frustrations of people to affect change on a tyrannical state without becoming part of that tyrannical state.

I'd have expected some of you people to have invented a Vandalize the Wikipedia drinking game by now.

Try to understand. To many of us, who have subjects that we have cared about and studied all our semi-adult lives, Wikipedia Is The Vandalism. And the lyin's share of that vandalism is committed and/or supported by the Kilroys who sign themselves as the "administrators, Jimbo Wales, and/or the Arbitration Committee". They are like some street gang that scrawls their inanities and carves their gangonyms all over the works of art that we cherish, and then -- of all the Gaul -- adding insult to injury, expect the rest of the world to preserve and respect their Gaulish "contributions".

Bah, Humbug !!!

Jonny

Yep, I'm not really qualified to comment upon social sciences, being trained only in the hard(core) ones, but my understanding is that it was Weber that first really studied bureacracies as a trend.

To go out on a limb (and again, please correct me if I'm wrong), Weber talked about three types of authority, namely charistmatic, tyrannical, and rational-legal. Wikipedia has gone through the three of these, Jimbo, Angry Jimbo, and Arbcom with a Cabal. It is the latter type that is the bureaucratic type that was beginning to emerge in Weber's time.



Funny you should say that, I find the mini-cabals of certain groups of people on Wikipedia to be quite bonding, actually.

If you're not qualified, why do you bring it up then?

Subject to the vagaries of translation, those are more often called the charismatic, traditional, and bureaucratic types. The charismatic type tends to be short-lived -- the Mimbo-Jimbo tends to lose its favor on the bedpost over night. The traditional type comes a crupper when there arises a contest for succession -- think of the recent contentions over the co-demi-semi-foundership of Wikipedia. So there is an almost irresistable gravitation toward bureaucracy, if not the ultimate gravitational collapse of the Wikipedian dim-hole.

Jonny

I'm amazed at the constant impugning of Jimbo's personal integrity; he is after, a fiduciary of the Foundation. Baseless attacks on someones personal integrity or motives, implying all his actions and decisions are based upon his own personal prejudices and whims, his personal habits, likes and dislikes, is like crying wolf. No one hears it after a while.

HHMF

(He Hit Me First)

Jonny

Was he acting in the capacity of a fiduciary or private person when he did? (assuming he did).

That sort of talk will get you banned as a Wikisolicitor in the Proper English Wikipedia, but being a Yank, I'll let you off with a warning this time.

But the question has arisen:

Is Dr. Jimbo responsible for the actions of Mr. Hive?

Caucus ! Caucus ! Caucus !

Jonny

I need lessons... Infact, it would be doing the internet a favor by helping wkipeida to inplode.

You should start a cyber school of Wikivandalism and recuite the masses needed to break wikpedia in to a million bits of bytes...

Its only in reading this thread that I realised that I've never intentionally vandalized Wikipedia - every change I've made, I have attempted to properly source as factual information.

That doesn't mean that I haven't been accused of vandalism, but that's a different matter.

Its curious - its as if I want Wikipedia to succeed at some level, even though rationally I know that that isn't possible. It just goes to show.

One of the quickest ways to get banned from Wikipedia is by following the norms of sourced research that its policies were initially supposed to embody.

One day I realized that the Wikipedia Management is far too hidebound with arrogance and ignorance ever to right itself again, and yet there is one thing that kept me working on improving articles for as long as they let me. It is the distributed character of the information. The game is to put the quality of information out there that is capable of surviving the coming disintegration of the Wikimedia Foundation itself.

Jonny

Too bad. That would be a more interesting discussion.

OK. So Weber spoke of a "charismartic" or messianic type of leader; this is the type people long for. After FDR's untimely demise for instance, there was a "charismatic vacuum" so to speak, Truman didn't enjoy the the same popular affection FDR did (same as LBJ after JFK). So people stumbled in the dark looking for that new charismatic leader (kinda like Democrats since Clinton left office). Alger Hiss, for example had that potential, young, upcoming, first Secretary General for the Hope of Mankind, etc. Then a villian destroyed him, i.e. Nixon. This set a vendetta on Nixon. The villian turned around and used his despicable deed to get himself elected messiah. But those whose messianic hopes had been dashed were not gonna let him get away with it.

This is a classic example of what's meant by "mindless partisanship", i.e. when people set thier sites & hopes on mere mortal men, and betray thier own inner ideals.