Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia does tend to protect long time contributors and not have to outside sources that do not like an article. There is a meta game in Wikipedia that if you do small changes and write justifications in wikilawyer speak and you discredit your opponents in the right fashion you can win even if you are technically wrong. It is a beuruaucracy and some can play the game well.

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I've noticed the same behavior on Reddit, hackernews, Tumblr, and lesswrong. As long as you say it in the right cadence for the given forum, you can be completely off base and be getting upvotes.

I try to be aware of it but I see myself mindlessly agreeing with someone just because they took the superior tone for the given format.

HN cleverly flips this around to its advantage. Even comments that are categorically wrong often contribute to the conversation. Some of the best comments on HN happen when a comment is so wrong that it baits a sleeping expert into responding.

Thats a matter of quantity though. Have enough of it and the content and normal users get drowned out and leave.

In the end, good faithed users contribute in thier spare time. Once certain interests are involved, you are faced with bad faithed actors who make their livelihood sabotaging this.

Catch enough controversy and this will ruin almost any project where people cooperate in their spare time to inform about something.

It's got very little to due with length of contribution it's pure inner circle behavior.

Then it's a pretty big "inner circle".

From everyone that uses Wikipedia a subset has made an edit. And within that subset an even smaller fraction is part of the inner circle that has some ideas about Wikipedia's culture. The Chinese Communist Party is vast, but it still qualifies as an inner circle, even though that onion has plenty of layers.

"Inner" doesn't mean "small", it just means "inside a larger one"

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