QUOTE(mms @ Wed 26th December 2007, 1:33pm)
Did I just miss it or is my question to Jimbo Wales regarding the exclusion of groups not yet discussed here?
I guess there are no direct links to these events on your English talk-page because it was all done in German? Too bad! Anyways, when you said:
QUOTE
I replied that productive cooperation is only possible after the fascistoid admin clique is disempowered"
You called the emperor naked, and That's Not Allowed. Actually to suggest there is an emperor is pretty bad on its own. Jimbo will ignore you -- but don't feel too bad, as he ignores all serious questions put to him. And, just in case you are making a really good point, one that is in direct contradiction to the wikiality handed down by the leader, there are even protective bootlickers available to tell you to
shut the fuck up.
Your experience and final question deals directly to authority at Wikipedia. The people in charge prefer to think of themselves as not really being in charge, just a group of happy, benevolent types who are reluctantly changing the wikidiaper day in and day out. And for no pay, and little gratitude. They get quite angry when the usual structures of social dominance mysteriously appear -- this was not the intended result. They certainly don't like it when a lowly editor points out the inconvenient truth. I suspect that all anarchist-like experiments ultimately fail when the cognitive dissonance just becomes too great (WP isn't there yet though).
In essence, Wikipedia's authority model is an exercise of plausible deniability. No one is in charge, but people still manage to get blocked and banned anyways.
Regarding excluding groups and such: WP already went through such an episode earlier in the year under the name "BADSITES". The problem was the usual one: the proposed rules were too explicit for a ruling class that prefers vague, ill-defined, categories. (So you can allow friends who are in the class, and exclude enemies who are not in the class.) Many of the upper-class rulers were almost frank in saying this too.