Wikipedia

From DoWire Wiki

Wikipedia is a large public wiki that claims to be an encyclopedia. Ward Cunningham, a pioneer of the wiki method and technology, told its founders that any effort to create encyclopedias with wikis might start as an encyclopedia but would eventually end up as a wiki, with quite different content, rules and usefulness than would normally be accorded an encyclopedia.

Founder Larry Sanger avoided this advice and put his own Ohio State doctoral thesis to the test. Titled Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification, Sanger's structure emphasized the use of attributed claims only, so that statements of the form "A said B about C" would dominate. This he developed into the ideology of "neutral point of view". Opponents who declared that systemic bias and sysop power structures necessarily in place for any online service would quickly disempower factions who challenged neutrality as defined by the dominant clique, eventually named a more descriptive concept, "new troll point of view", pronounced and abbreviated identically, to try to describe what was actually happening at Wikipedia.

Sanger himself, in a 2005 Kuro5hin posting, claimed that Wikipedia had in fact been "taken over by trolls", validating this view and description.

Wikipedia remains the main source of new GFDL corpus articles and the main place where GFDL corpus namespace issues are sorted out in public.

Process innovations such as the troll name, as of and itself also often originate at that wiki.