I thought it might be helpful to classify some of the motives and techniques at work to disrupt Wikipedia. Please understand that this is not in any way to encourage such disruption, merely observations drawn from my own experience and Original Research.

There are several overlapping motives for trying to disrupt Wikipedia.

• The belief that Wikipedia and all its competitors are destroying the orderly transfer and storage of authentic human knowledge
• The belief that Wikipedia in its present form is failing in its mission to store knowledge and needs a violent revolution before it can achieve its goal
• The belief that the Wikipedia community and power structure is hopelessly corrupt, beyond reform and in need of destruction
• The desire to insert information for personal or group benefit irrespective of its truth or significance
• The desire to create works of performance art and fictional creation irrespective of the effect on an encyclopaedia
• The desire to dominate other people in a virtual world
• The desire to destroy something useful and cause pain and suffering to those who value it
• The desire to write the word "poop"

Before starting a preliminary taxonomy of methods I'd like to get some views about the completeness, or otherwise, of the list of motives.

OK these seem to be the 'noble reasons'

• The belief that Wikipedia and all its competitors are destroying the orderly transfer and storage of authentic human knowledge
• The belief that Wikipedia in its present form is failing in its mission to store knowledge and needs a violent revolution before it can achieve its goal
• The belief that the Wikipedia community and power structure is hopelessly corrupt, beyond reform and in need of destruction

Although I would quibble with the wording. All knowledge is authentic. And knowledge is mostly about summarising and presenting in a systematic way, not about 'storage' or 'transfer'.

The ones below are the equivalent of vandals ripping up young trees planted in public spaces. Or just plain graffiti.

You forgot:

• a sincere but hopelessly misguided effort to correct "bias" against one's country/religion/employer/favorite band.

Because people who are convinced that their version of the truth is right can't be persuaded that their view isn't a neutral point of view, even if 95% of the population don't share it, it tends to be these in-good-faith types who cause the most spectacular revert wars and shouting matches. Other publishers sidestep the issue by agreeing a "line" for anything with multiple authorship, but the Wiki model isn't good for this. Watch the history of cold fusion for a good example of this.

This isn't a flaw in Wikipedia in particular, but in open editing; I'm sure that if/when Wikipedia Review, Citizendium et al acquire "Scientology", "Lyndon LaRouche" and all the other WR favorites, they'll have exactly the same issue.

Well, up to a point. Scholarly activity not only produces knowledge but authenticates it (peer review and so on) although it's hardly a perfect mechanism. OTOH Wikipedia fails to achieve that. It may say it wants to (and may indeed mean what it says) but it has no mechanisms in place to actually do it.

This looks like a pretty complete taxonomy to me. The one category that might be added, though it may be more theoretical than real at least at the moment, would be the desire to downgrade or denigrate Wikipedia to give advantage to a competing source or project.

I believe you've left out two very important ones: personal vindication (Wikipedia publishes something about you or someone or something you care about that is defamatory, and you wish it to stop doing so), and personal revenge (Wikipedia or someone associated with it has harmed, irritated, annoyed, or bothered you, and you wish to punish Wikipedia and/or some person associated with Wikipedia for their roles in doing so).

I think these both can be distinguished from the list above because neither of these motives presumes that Wikipedia is "something of value" or "useful", and the actor in both cases does not see his attempts of disruption as harmful to the world in general.

Another unrelated one you left out: Wikipedia consumes resources that could be better utilized in other ways.

When done well, I think this may be one of the more benevolent uses of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is like many other Defective Products that have been unleashed on the Public without adequate testing of their safety and effectiveness.

In default of such testing being done prior to release, the Public has a right and a duty to expose the flaws of such products.

Jon Awbrey

Ah yes, the jealousy motive.

There's hardly any regular here who doesn't think that they could make a better encyclopedia if given the chance. But if there is a better encyclopedia model out there, then critically analysing Wikipedia must surely be lubricant to the new model.

Talking about lubricants and analizing the Wikipedia, rather than uploading high resolutions images of our anuses or genitalia - which is, of course, entirely reasonable, acceptable and defended behavior on the Wikipedia - we could have a competition to see who can insert the most "poop" words - or whatever - as possible and creatively, e.g. by aligning the left hand-side justified columns of other relevant and well referenced content, and then watch the chorus of Pee-dia kneejerkers cancan dance all the way to the heretic burnings.

• How many activists would it take to flood and overload their defence mechanisms at any one time?
• How many Whack-the-Gopher admins are there on duty at any given time?

For example,

content creation appears to be more than often
undermined on the poorly managed Wikipedia by
numerous different kinds of strategies employed by
the ignorant, self-interested and recidivist elements of our
society unhindered by any sentiments of responsibility.

We make a time and day, all go down to our local Starbucks, and having their IP address blocked ... if it builds up a head of steam, apart from enjoying the cappuccino, if might put some of the fun back into the activity.

A 'pee-dian flash party.

The other implication being that all the usual vandalism, POV pushing, crap and sneaking editing during that flood tide would go on unchecked and unstoppable.

Prizes could be awarded for the funniest, most creative, obscene or longest lasting edits ... sponsorship being sought from corporations who can have their product names or trademarks inserted.

Shsssssiish! Don't TELL everyone about this, or pretty soon everybody will be doing it. And then I won't be able to.

We could, but I'm pretty sure we tried that already, back in '07. It actually worked for a while, but after a couple of hours the WMF servers were up and running again as if nothing had ever happened...

Having said that, the question of how many Whack-the-Gopher admins there are on duty at any given time might well be a useful metric. We'd have to base the figure on number-of-edits, though, when in fact the number who are monitoring WP but not actually whacking gophers is probably a somewhat higher number.

I beg to differ. It's unlikely that Greg Kohs or Larry Sanger would allow those wikis to achieve the level of berserk chaos that the Jimbo-hos seem to positively enjoy.

And, of course, we might have to admit defeat when confronted with the evidence that the history of humanity as whole also seems to operate on the level of berserk chaos, or at least regular periods of berserk chaos interspaced with mundane tedium.

Perhaps the project just resonates with them.

They say it was the Duke of Wellington who opposed the establishment of the railways on the grounds that it would only encourage "the lower orders" to travel ... what would he have thought of them writing their own Encyclopedia?

If there was a determined effort to disrupt Wikipedia, how would anyone tell?

The most obvious telltale would be a sudden, inexplicable increase in quality.