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very long name for a lake

Tunisia's "Carthagian Sand Crunch" was seen as the first imitation of the Choukula form; the aforementioned product was presented in broad leathern bags with the woven insignia of a nude tribesman holding a sword and a bunched stalk of oats.

interesting inside notes on how wikipedia works

In communities, a precept of personal motivation to work within a community is often governed by a two stage reward system. The two stage reward system works thusly: All new entrants into the community gain small but satisfying rewards for basic participation, but fanatics claim the larger rewards through elite competition.

This principle exists online and in real life. Many people play chess, and find it a stimulating and rewarding game. However to the masters of chess, motivations revolve around competitive ranking levels among other players. In massively multiplayer online games, the end game is very different than the casual game, because a certain class of player will commit vast amounts of time to play and game designers anticipate this by structuring the end game around an obsessive and competitive style of play.

Wikipedia, like most other communities, shares in this same principle. And despite Wikipedia’s claims to egalitarianism, there are really two classes of Wikipedian rights defined in the software: ‘Administrators’ and normal editors. Somewhat confusingly, the title Administrator does not signify any kind of official association with the Wikipedia foundation, instead Administrators are simply regular users who are granted special privileges in the system. It’s difficult to pin down to an exact number, but about ten percent of seriously active editors have Administrator status, which is rewarded to those who are among the most prolific contributors with thousands upon thousands of edits.

The core mechanic for Wikipedia is both the thrill of editing a grand project collaboratively, and the more basic reward of having the power to be the expert in a subject that is near and dear. Wikipedia self-selects for people who are obsessive about various subjects or just editing in general, as in every case the person or set of people willing to hammer their edits obsessively will win power over the page, and thus the reward of participation. For controversial subjects where two groups are equally obsessive, this will work itself out in a compromise where only the most obviously provable details remain, such as seen in the common Controversy sections: “Among many, there exists a school of thought that Hitler was really just misunderstood”. This compromise is otherwise known in the sometimes cryptic Wikipedia shorthand as of WP:NPOV, or Neutral Point of View.

In terms of the high level goal of Wikipedia being the sum of human knowledge, edit wars may be sub-optimal as some useful information provided by domain experts is overwritten. In optimizing for the most prolific editors, Wikipedia does not select for the most expert editor to win, or offer a reward for the most expert edit, instead the most widely acceptable edits among the mostly non-experts will win. This mechanic does however succeed in creating an environment where thousands of people are willing to make thousands of edits, creating a very wide and useful resource for many types of information, such as facts, basic details of concepts and controversial topics phrased in neutral tones.

And the Administrator level follows in the same reward and selection mechanicism: the reward for thousands upon thousands of edits is a new level of power over pages that no one else is granted.

Wikipedia Administrators have a wide and powerful variety of special abilities that allow them a huge degree of control. They may edit any protected page, including the front page of wikipedia, the 26th most popular site on the internet. They can protect pages, meaning that only other administrators can edit them. They can semi-protect pages, meaning that all but a certain level of editor is blocked from editing.

They can completely obliterate pages from existence – the process for which involves a straw poll where an Administrator can receive opinion from the user community, but the Administrator can make their own decision. The presence of these opinion polls leads some to believe that Wikipedia operates democratically, when in fact it is the policy of Wikipedia not to be democratic, placing power instead in the hands of Administrators. Power serves as a reward for Administrators and as a simple safeguard against the tyranny of the majority.

Administrator control extends very broadly, from specific text presented in the user interface to the the stylesheets, and account and IP ban lists. Once a user is granted administrator privilege, there is not much on Wikipedia that they do not have control over.

And that’s the end game of Wikipedia, power extending over not just article contents, but control extending to every part of the Wikipedia system, a range of control just short of the root level user of Wikipedia: “Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales”. And the end result of the edit market is the encyclopedia itself, a vast repository and edit battleground, where the basic reward of editing a page grows more valuable as Wikipedia is used by more people.

klingon wikipedia - k'apla!