Wiki needs trolls

The Ecology of Trolls:

In a charming article on Wikipedia, Nicholson Baker talks about the rise of vandals:

The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that's true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: "Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany." Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are "frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen." Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch." No: "A Pop-Tart is a flat condom." Once last fall the whole page was replaced with "NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!"

This sounds chaotic, but even the Pop-Tarts page is under control most of the time. The "unhelpful" or "inappropriate"—sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metalheaded—changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It's a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons.

Wait... why do the vandals cause an improvement?

Say you're working away on the Wikipedia article on aging. You've got some nice scientific language in there and it's really starting to shape up:

After a period of near perfect renewal (in Humans, between 20 and 50 years of age), organismal senescence is characterized by the declining ability to respond to stress, increasing homeostatic imbalance and increased risk of disease. This irreversible series of changes inevitably ends in Death.

Not bad!

And then somebody—a user with an address of 206.82.17.190, a "vandal"—replaces the entire article with a single sentence: "Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old." That happened on December 20, 2007. A minute later, you "revert" that anonymous editor's edit, with a few clicks; you go back in history to the article as it stood before. You've just kept the aging article safe, for the moment. But you have to stay vigilant, because somebody might swoop in again at any time, and you'll have to undo their harm with your power reverter ray. Now you're addicted. You've become a force for good just by standing guard and looking out for juvenile delinquents.

Any addiction arises because the pleasure centers in the brain light up -- they cause the body to release happy drugs that, in turn, create addictions. "Addiction" is a perjorative, in fact: this is learning behavior. We consider it a problem because sometimes nonproductive or even harmful activity can light up those centers, causing you to spend all your time snorting white powders or whatever it is that is causing you that high. In the wild, though, this is meant to be positive reinforcement.

So you get a spike from defending the Wikipedia against vandals; and that causes you to commit to spending time on the Wiki. You wander about, looking for vandalism to correct, touching things up here and there, and since you're here anyway, maybe you plug in a few details from a book you were reading recently (with proper citations, of course). The vandals addicted you, along with certain other qualities:

All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you're trying to sleep.

This is a pretty good metaphor for how you build, and maintain, the politically involved polity necessary to the success of a Republic. You need an engaged citizenry -- and who are the most engaged citizens? The ones who have friends that are involved, who want to participate because politics for them is social as much as it is practical...

...but more than that, those who perceive politics as a struggle against vandals attacking society. The really involved people are the pro-Life marchers, or the pro-Choice marchers -- the people who believe that society is being destroyed by someone else. It's that same energy that comes from standing off vandals that drives both the left and the right's key actors, the engaged few.

Now, the difference is: whereas vandals are obviously bad, in the case of the Republic you have people who have come to interpret other defenders as vandals. In the case of Wikipedia, the existence of vandals actually improves the final product.

In the Republic, much of that energy is turned on other people who are defending a different vision of the right way for the Republic to be. They are interpreting what you are doing out of your truly felt morals as vandalism -- and you may be interpreting their acts in the same way. This appears to me to be a flaw in the brain: a false identification of someone as a vandal, when in fact a real vandal actually intends to harm or destroy the project.

That leaves me with two questions:

1) Is there a method, other a greatly increased Federalism, by which you can resolve that tension?

2) If you're spending all your energy on "vandals" from the other side -- what about the real vandals? The ones who want to destroy the project?

The first question is about finding a way to work with other people who believe themselves to be moral actors, without ending up in a civil war. The second question has to do with the other sort of war. I would suggest that these two questions may point to the key problems facing the nation today.

It strikes me that the Obama campaign is attempting to address the first one, whereas the other two are not: while Obama shows no sign of pushing for actual compromises, he is at least attempting to recognize the 'other side' as moral actors, and to tone down the "vandal" rhetoric. This may be a way of at least approaching a discussion of how to fix the first problem: we can start talking across the aisle about how we might order things (Federalism being, as you know, my preferred solution) so that the defenders of both sides are more satisfied than currently.

Unfortunately, the Obama campaign seems not to believe that the second problem is a serious one, to judge from his recent statement on defense policy. If he thinks the greatest challenges facing our nation's military involve not building new weapons systems and cutting spending on things recommended by the Quadrenniel Defense Review, he's saying something I've heard before: in 1984, and 1988. The problem then, as now, was that there was an actual threat.

Making misjudgments about how many officers and men you will need -- and how many capital goods, like airplanes -- is tremendously expensive even if things go well. It costs a fortune to retool a factory, once you have shut down the line: so if you didn't bet right, you either can't get new airplanes, or you have to spend so much more to build any that you need to build hundreds to make back the cost of setting up the factory.

By the same token, the huge number of contractors engaged in the Iraq war exists for two reasons:

1) In 1993, when it had to start training majors and senior NCOs for service this year in 2008, Congress vastly underestimated the forces we would need.

2) No expeditionary civilian service exists to supplement the military, so nationbuilding operations and COIN operations are being largely carried by the military. Even the State-led PRTs and ePRTs, of which I've written much and in high praise, are often filled with military officers or reservists. In addition, an expeditionary civilian service needs to carry at least defensive arms, or the military has to be tasked to guard them anyway (or else you're back with contractors).

Congress also abolished the draft (and it is hard to draft people of field-grade-officer quality, or senior NCO quality, anyway -- how do you find them?). So, since they need men and women who can serve as majors (and there is a real shortage of majors in the Army right now), the only choice is to pay market rates to hire people with the right experience and willingness to come. That's "market rates" for people able to operate at that level, and enough to make them willing to interrupt their careers and lives -- for unlike an actual military officer or State Department official, who is furthering his career by deploying, other sorts of civilians are usually trading away the business they could have been building at home, or the job with a pension and healthcare they could have had, for a three-to-eighteen-month opportunity.

(And how much is that, exactly? Depends on the person, just like with any other market rate. My contract specifies that I am paid GS-12 pay, and as the Marines will tell you, that's the civilan service equivalent to a Major -- so, Congress doesn't lose out by hiring me at market rates, plus they didn't have to pay me for the previous fifteen years to get me here now. Others, however, demand better deals to come over.)

So, the Obama approach concerns me. It is reckless, and treats the DoD as more suspect than the actual enemies. In that way, it is an even worse misidentification of defenders for vandals than the one he seeks to address.

How do McCain and Clinton stack up? They seem uninterested in question one; but are substantially better on question two.