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Metaweb: Contributor (142.177.76.112)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Page moved to authored format as it is a statement of an individual, and not a generally accepted description of the Metaweb. --Pat

Roughly stated, there are three kinds of Metaweb Contributor:

  • Metaweb:community members who consider themselves to be in a social network with the other users, and to have some social contract with them. A Metaweb:administrator will be one of these. The other two types don't want the job:
  • Metaweb:anonymous contributors who may just add a note here and there, and have no interest in social interaction or friend-making or collaboration - they simply leave their stuff and don't really care what happens to it after the fact.
  • Metaweb:trolls who actively reject participating in community as equals, and interact socially only to challenge its assumptions and re-focus others on content, and away from community. They can help break up groupthink and express dissent that for some reason can't be expressed by those who think they are in some kind of community. A Metaweb:editor would be drawn most likely from the ranks of trolls, not from community members, as editorial policy is content-focused, not always popular, and not something that can be settled in the same way that "community" concerns are usually addressed.

Metaweb:etiquette must deal with the fact that all three groups of contributors exist, all three do have some useful purpose, and from time to time, any Metaweb:some body might choose to present themselves as any of the three. It's quite common on Wikipedia, for instance, for named and known users to take controversial actions anonymously, or under one-shot discardable user names. It's also common for them to have troll alter egos that they use to do or say things that they don't want to be associated with their regular user names and reputations - legitimate if unfair processes are involved, and there's a need to protect from rumour, etc. Metaweb:governance ideas will no doubt evolve due to the need to balance the three.

The above assumes that each of the three really expresses the views of some body. If no body holds the views, and they are merely spam, ideology with questionable body assumptions or interests, or otherwise not really expressing the views or concerns of one or more bodies, quite different rules should apply to their edits. A party or faction system may have to evolve to deal with cases where bodies combine into non-body entities to press common interests.