Sweet surrender and your poison pen are gonna take you and make you whole again.

[reddragdiva]

Many years ago, we had a problem on alt.gothic with persistent and vicious Usenet trolls. The sort of people who consider they have an absolute right of free speech to fuck up social spaces in any way they aren't actually physically stopped from behaving. I even still have a page up about the dears.

I am just reading Consumerium. Read this, this and this. Think about them. Roll them around in your head for a bit. Understand what the aims are here. This is a project to do a specific and highly worthwhile thing.

Then read this and try to work out how they will ever get back from point B to point A. I can't see it myself.

Even the front page got vandalised. I wonder how long it's been that way and if the non-native English speakers running Consumerium will ever notice. These parasitical trolling fuckwits have infested it comprehensively. One hopes they are proud of their fine work.

Kill it and start over? At present it's so comprehensively fucked I doubt any wiki spirit would survive the bureaucratic processes required to fix it in place.

That said, the trolls are nothing to the fuckheads. "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because rogues sometimes rest" — Alexandre Dumas (fils), loosely translated.

Nonhierarchical intentions are an ideal to work towards. Motivation of volunteers is incredibly powerful but incredibly fragile. But stuff like this make me think, "let's give JACKBOOTED FASCISM A CHANCE." (Then I take my medicine.)

Collaborative development is the future of almost any field that can possibly be cast in terms of factual information. But refusal to believe fuckheads and arseholes exist will not protect you from them. Assume good intentions and carry a big fucking stick.

Update: I asked Juxho about this in IRC a few days later. He's seriously considering wiping the whole thing and starting over. I fear this may be the only answer.

Comments

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

Hmm - these people aren't actually attacking consumerism per se - they are using consumerism to attack wikipedia.

They are just using the space to make personal attacks on wikipedia contributors.

For example:
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Wikipedia_Red_Faction
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/English_Wikipedia_User_Plato
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Trollherd
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Trolling
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Wikimedia
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Trolls
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Driven_off_by_trolls
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Troll-friendly
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Heroic_trolling
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Magnificent_trolling
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Wikimedia_corruption
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Usual_happy_NPOV_talk
http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/New_Troll_point_of_view

The worst ones have been blanked:
eg: http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/index.php/Auntie_Angela

They have a problem with a user formerly known as EntmootsofTrolls, and who edits as 142.x.x.x. He would happily kill consumerism because he wasn't allowed to game play at Wikipedia.

Yes - the guy does appear to be a wanker.

[reddragdiva]

Ah, he's not doing the equivalent of hacking a box to trash it, just the equivalent of hacking a box to use it to attack another? Love these folk.

Of course, with some of those rants he may have crossed over to Fuckhead. There's a certain nutter's edge.

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I got a bit lost there. Particularly with all the talk about governance of Wikipedia, DOS attacks and 'usurpers'. What's that got to do with the price of fish? (Not that, as a vegetarian, I pay the slightest attention to the price of fish.)

Is there something wrong with Wikipedia that I should know about?

Oh, and what's with fact-index.com? They seem to have taken all the content from Wikipedia, made it non-editable, and added google text ads.

-roy

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, it bans people who repeatedly try to trash it, then bans their sockpuppets when they return. Unforgivable.

Copying the content is entirely allowable. There's even a page to help you. That page also, by the way, explains why the mirrors end up higher in Google is that Wikipedia can't actually survive a full-on Googling - the bottleneck is the database server - whereas the mirrors tend to be flat HTML and can be indexed much faster.

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it bans people who repeatedly try to trash it, then bans their sockpuppets when they return. Unforgivable.

Thanks for the info. I figured/hoped that's all it was, but I don't really follow these things...

Interesting about the spidering thing. It was the fact that I keep seeing fact-index pages rather than Wikipedia pages in my Google search results that riled me...

Though I now note that fact-index is listed as one of the copies that is in good compliance with the license.

Hmm, LJ didn't send me a comment notification for your reply... Time to go check my mail server logs...

-roy

[paulsoth.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia Special-Forces?

Count me in. Sick of some of these vandals. Hey, can we go after the PoV abusers as well?

[reddragdiva]

That's pretty much everyone's job, so it doesn't need a special name ;-)

Unfortunately, calling someone a complete fuckhead when they are one is considered inappropriate. How annoying.

[kest]

That's pretty much everyone's job, so it doesn't need a special name

'Who is AGSF? You are.'

[reddragdiva]

Wikipedia works because the average life of casual vandalism is five minutes. (IBM even did a study.) Becoming a sysop/admin is not that l33t, because it's considered grossly bad form to use your Satanic powers on anything you personally care about - you're supposed to have them to keep things working. "Congratulations, you're an Administrator! Here's your mop, here's your bucket."

[alixandrea.livejournal.com]

Umm, I must be missing a big fat point here, but as far as I can see, a list of products and their origins, ethics and environmental impact can only be a good thing. There are magazines already dedicated to this sort of thing, but having a free online list that is searchable makes the process of trying to find out which is the most ethical product very much easier. I think it's a great project, or am I missing some behind-the-scenes thing that turns it nasty?

[reddragdiva]

Yes, that's the point - the first set of links show what it's for (the worthwhile stuff), the second set show what a bunch of fuckwits are abusing it for (a launching pad for attacks on another project). Coherency is optional in rants ;-)

[alixandrea.livejournal.com]

Aaaaahhhh I see... So, does that mean that using the site would actually be unethical and should be avoided...? ;-)

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

Are you sure the useful stuff isn't written by the same people as the nonsense, as a front?

[reddragdiva]

Don't think so. secretlondon said something about juxho (of Consumerium) being less than pleased with 142's fine works on his wiki. He'd quite like it to be used for the purpose it was built.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm. Odd. Annoying. In that it seems clear that the only thing that some of these people will respond to is a good shoeing, because they're confident in the inability of 'polite society' to hand out such, since 'violence is bad & wrong, m'kay?'

On the other hand, the fact that I think in that direction fairly quickly would seem to indicate that the wiki is an immature a social space as usenet since there's no useful sanction for Being A Dick.

Where's the cock-shaped soundwave when you need it?

And indeed, why don't things like Linux-kernel, KDE or INN seem to suffer as badly? There are clearly Complete Strops that end up in module-waving at twenty paces, but the social sanction of 'You're being a twat and that's not going in the distribution' appears to work. I guess it's the narrower focus.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, it's having a task to aim for. Wikipedia can't say "you're being a dick and that's not going in the distribution" directly, although the far greater proportion of non-dicks tends to keep things relatively sane. The people with the power to kick people out bend over backwards to avoid doing so, and the particular dick who's running rampant on Consumerium (a fellow known as "142", after his IP number) is someone who was such a dick he's been banned for life. (And keeps coming back with sock puppets and still hangs out on #wikipedia.)

Disinfopedia seems to do okay with an only slightly more focused mission than Wikipedia. OpenFacts operates as a backup wiki when Wikipedia is down, and has a bit of rubbish from 142, but it tends to be ignored.

Tell you what - the striking thing about these trolls, and particularly 142, is their self-importance. Fuckheads are actually a much worse problem than trolls in practice.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

I just don't understand the mentality of trolls. Why? I mean, I sometimes play the odd practical joke, which could be seen as a scaled down version of the same thing. But to harass an entire community for months...

Jealousy?

[reddragdiva]

The Internet troll article has been gravely fucked around by 142 loading it with self-important sockpuppetry. I do intend to go in there with an axe some time soon. The worst thing about that article is that there are little or no good references. And I left my copy of Flame Wars in Australia, dammit!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It may boil down to something like Ver Troll having forgotten the first rule of Usenet: 'On the usenet, there is always someone cleverer than you.' (or rather who knows more about the subject under discussion.)

[reddragdiva]

They appear to want to prove not that they are smarter, but that we aren't smart enough to get rid of their unwanted attentions, which is a much higher bar.

[reddragdiva]

If your German module isn't loaded today: OpenFacts Wikipedia Status.

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

Looks familiar. super-ultra-extra fuzzy-headed PC type thinking taken to ludicrous extremes and taken advantage of by trolls.

Seriously, this stuff rings of all of the rants by all of the "Fight the power!" and "You should be nicer, and open to new voices," types that ever showed up on alt.gothic. Seriously, it looks like a trolls version of heaven.

I'd say that it's unfortunate about the project, but I'd also say that anyone who bends so far over backwards to eliminate any trace of authority or the appearance of authority, or limits of any sort, really *needs* an education in how that actually works out in practice.

[kest]

I'm having difficulty sorting through the stuff there and separating the shit from the content, but are you saying Consumium's policy on trolls is to turn the other cheek? Someone can't go in and, say, overwrite all those pages with 'getalifegetalifegetalife' because that would be Not Nice, poor form, in a way being a troll somehow isn't?

[reddragdiva]

Yeah. I think the other problem is that, as fundamentally good as Consumerium's aims are, said aims seem to have been stated horribly fluffily to me.