Laziness

Lots of editors are just plain lazy. The last thing they intend to do is to look up sources. If they look up sources, they use Google and find something on-line. But even that is usually too much trouble. Even writing is too much trouble. Even reading is too much trouble. So what's left? Opinions, expressed on a talk page. Deletions of someone else's work. Pasting tags: POV, DELETE, whatever. These editors aren't trolls, but they are slackers. And like slackers in a college class, you just want to give them an F and send them home. But you can't, of course, and you have to waste your own energy countering their opinions, reverting their edits, and teaching them policy.

Wikipedia is full of friction. This is not a gang of enthusiastic boy scouts eagerly working together to put up camp. This is a bunch of eccentric strangers each trying to do things their own way. Interaction between editors is seldom efficient team work. One seldom hears, "I'll take care of this, and you do that!" Instead one hears, "What exactly do you think you are doing?", followed by a day of exchanges on a talk page. It's best to avoid other editors, they are either trolls or slackers, they just slow you down, they just cause friction.

But who would want to be here if there were no other editors? Isn't the problem with Citizendium that it's just too lonely? Other editors are friction, sure, but they are also the reason we come here, to participate with a community doing something worthwhile. And since we are all eccentric strangers, we don't pull together in harness in the same direction. Friction is inevitable.

The evolved rules help reduce friction. Trolls are beasts that generate way too much friction, and the rules have evolved to force out the incorrigibly trollish, and to make the rest of us suppress our trollish natures. Slackers generate friction too, but the rules don't appear to touch them.

I would like to see, not a formal rule, but a norm, that anyone who complains that an article is unbalanced has the obligation to do something about it. This wouldn't apply so much to someone who notices an objectively evident problem (for example, that the article lacks citations), but would apply full force to people who delete large sections of an article because they object to its POV, or paste POV tags on an article. A norm like this would reduce the friction caused by slackers.

Irrational exuberance

Stock markets are one of the most obvious examples of the "Wisdom of Crowds." The efficient market hypothesis holds that the current price of a stock reflects all available information, that any changes in a stock's price can only come from information that is unavailable, and that therefore no one can predict changes in a stock's price from available information. The most important piece of information, of course, is the current and future earnings of the stock-issuing firm.

In the 1990s, stock investors became markedly more optimistic about stocks, without really encountering much in the way of new information. Alan Greenspan famously described this a a period of "irrational exuberance". The crowd--not as wise as one would have hoped--succeeded in creating a stock bubble, which eventually popped.

In Wikipedia, one can encounter editors who are possessed with what may be described as "irrational exuberance." For example, an editor who engages in a months-long battle with other editors over something as trivial as the renaming of a page, writing hundreds of talk page comments, provoking other editors to respond with even more comments, and eventually winning, because the other editors have finally given up waging such a pointless battle.

Monomania can be rewarded in Wikipedia, in that someone absurdly devoted to a particular issue can get his way. Nevertheless, the monomaniac can only win if the issue has no devoted partisans on the other side, and in practice this means that he can win only if the issue is relatively trivial. And the monomaniac can only win for a short time. As soon as he grows tired of Wikipedia and leaves for other interests, his work will be reverted, since new editors will find it so out of tune with the prevailing view.

Telling the teacher

In elementary school the teacher is an all-powerful enforcer, who interprets the rules of the school, and metes out reward and punishment. When children encounter conflict they turn to this enforcer, they "tell the teacher." There is some opprobrium associated with tattling, so it is considered only a last resort, and chosen only by the loser in a conflict, after peers have refused to rally to his side.

Wikipedia is celebrated as an anarchy, where it is possible to ignore rules, and where everything should be settled by consensus among reasonable editors. Nevertheless, these editors all came up through elementary schools, and all have learned the tactic of telling the teacher when they feel unfairly used. The analogue of the teacher in Wikipedia is the administrator, and these must constantly lend an ear to the complaints of the insecure and the marginalized.

In fact, administrators can't do much. A conflict takes time to develop, and may be spread over many pages; the users all have a background, providing context for the conflict, spreading over many more pages. A just appraisal of a conflict requires too much work, and no one is interested in a conflict to which they have not been a party.

But, on the other hand, users appeal regularly to administrators, and it seems wrong to simply ignore the appeal. There are a few rules that provide a clean way to assign guilt to a user, without requiring an administrator to study background material: the three-revert rule, and rules against threats, especially legal threats. Violate one of these rules, and the case is immediately decided; otherwise, the case is more murky, and the administrator's most sensible response is to say, in diplomatic terms, "don't be a crybaby, learn to get along with other children."

A system like Wikipedia needs a few rules whose violation leads to near-certain punishment. A good system of rules relies on a very narrow set of information: detection of violators should require reading only a small amount of text, and should require no effort to interpret what the user really meant. Violating these rules should function as a tripwire, leading to automatic punishment. Most of the worst species of trolls are weeded out with these tripwire rules.

Such rules create an environment in which a certain kind of troll has evolved: a troll who appears to be polite, but who edits aggressively, who is a master of subtle tactics of obfuscation and obstruction, and whose polite comments often appear to their recipients as thinly veiled taunts. Never in violation of the tripwire rules, this kind of troll flourishes in Wikipedia, and can only be detected by the subjective and laborious task of reading his posts and interpreting his meaning--a task that no administrator is willing to take on.