Talk:Troll rating

From dKosopedia

This is just named wrong. It belongs at term:troll rating to be critically discussed.

Read Wikipedia article on Internet trolls where they have encountered more of them than anyone (a whole wiki troll culture has developed actually between them, slashdot.org and some of the political wikis). That article makes it very obvious that "troll" is a subjective evaluation and not one that can be indulged in without risk. This narrow technical feature needs a different name.

Let's reframe:troll rating:

If the only purpose of a "troll rating" is to express a specific editorial judgement to ignore a specific page, and it's not to label a person or their intent or affiliations or associations, then, using a loaded word like "term:troll" is only going to encourage behaviour that the article spends 90% of its time warning against. It should be an "ignore this post" button or just "ignore". And more importantly, one must distinguish different kinds of reasons to ignore things:

1. spam - totally out of context material clearly intended as advertising to boost someone's link count, adding literally nothing to the debate, should be deleted on sight and purged if possible from the page record (to prevent messing up the diffs and so on)
2. wiki graffiti - non-commercial expressions like "Jesus Sux", "Eddie roolz", and so on, that simply over-write the material; Because some of these things are actually attempts at comment, they should be reverted without changing the page record - this is minor vandalism as it involves no great effort to undo, and is often just newbies testing things out
3. True wiki vandalism - deliberate insertion of things that are easily proven false, like changing well-known dates or claims about past events. For instance, changing the date of the Pearl Harbor attack to December 9, 1942: easily proven wrong, and often hard to spot.
4. An anonymous troll making a view known - you don't like it, you don't think it's very relevant, but you know damn well that some people in the world really do believe such stuff, and that you can't avoid answering to it in general, even if not in this thread; So a better name for this is a "comment out of place", like a "weed" is a "plant out of place". It should be refactored (what dkosopedia:itself is for!) but not removed from sight. Sometimes inane users just need to be pointed at the correct page. As an example, the Green Party of Canada Living Platform in the Canadian federal election, 2004 let literally anyone post comments - and most of those attached to its its front page were about same-sex marriage! Obviously the wrong place, but that might just mean that opponents of that measure are slow, rather than being malign.
5. Everything else is politics as usual - seemingly deliberate antagonism coming from characters like littlegreenfootballs.com, who include many trolls from the perspective of Kos users. From the perspective of that forum, however, Kos users are trolls. Either side can express its true beliefs and the other side will express disbelief, accusations of insincerity, and so on. For example there really are people posting who want to "nuke Iran" and there are real people also who want to "negotiate with al-Qaida", and these people are not so likely to have very civil conversations.