Mobocracy
From RationalWiki
Mobocracy (literally "rule by the mob") is a layman's neologism for ochlocracy, where there is no accepted leadership and disputes are often settled by brute force or the sheer weight of people. It is related to anarchism, but not even anarchy is this anarchistic. Sometimes it is used as a pejorative term used to denigrate the concept of democracy.
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[edit] On the Internet
Mobocracy can be considered to be the ruling principle of sites like Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia has rules which must be followed to regulate the behavior of users, it is generally "run" by mass consensus. Certain Conservapedia admins (such as ASchlafly) have noted that Wikipedia is a mobocracy and declared it to be one in the worst possible sense.[1] In the eyes of these commentators, mobocracy is apparently undesirable because, even though it does allow the people to control content or action, it doesn't allow the right people to control content or action. To combat this clearly problematic issue, Conservapedia is not run as a mobocracy and all steps to avoid it are taken, resulting in it being run as a fundamentalist, theocratic Ministry of Truth.
[edit] On RationalWiki
Mobocracy is, however, the openly stated governing principle of RationalWiki. Although in this case its use is part snark and (most likely) part laziness on behalf of the site's founders. It certainly has no basis in the violence associated with mobocracy "IRL".
[edit] How it works
The mobocracy in this respect means that users, by bickering, shouting, unilateral actions, complaints about unilateral actions, and ad hoc voting eventually reach a mass consensus. This consensus eventually forms a general site policy - which is subject to being overturned or ignored by the mob at any time - that is documented in the Community Standards page. This works surprisingly well.[citation needed]
[edit] History
It seems that nobody fully remembers how RW Became a "Mobocracy", as there is no history on the site describing the development. In the Autumn of 2008 a debate about the Mobocracy produced the following theories from various founder members:
- AKjeldsen: I think the basic idea of the mobocracy goes all the way back to the earliest days of RW 1.0, or even before that. It was mostly a counter-reaction to the power abuse of the CP sysops.
- Bob M: I honestly can't remember if we debated the issue, and I can't seem to find any history. My impression is that although Trent is the site owner he didn't want to dominate the site, and so he gave it to the users. Given that it was his to give I don't think there was any debate on it. But this is just my impression - I can't find diffs to back it up.
- PalMD: If we think back a little bit, the term "mobocracy" was originally imposed on us by certain people, the most important of whom shall remain nameless. Like "fag", "dyke" and other similar epithets, it was adopted and it's meaning co-opted by the, er, mob. We we're, as AK says, never a mobocracy as such (except as RW 1.0 perhaps). Our rules have generally worked well, even in HCM. My 2 cents.
- Tmtoulouse: I was one of the main architects in setting up a lot of the phrases, guidelines, and the like that have been used to define the "governance" of this site. I was not the only one by any means, and a lot of it was developed in a zeitgeist that has probably left. Much of what was established was a reaction against our experience at CP and a desire to try a Web 2.0 experiment that was different than "established" wikis.
- Human: It started on RW 1.0, which was sheer mayhem anyway. The "rulelessness" was continued onto RW 2.0. Since the mob has no rules on how to change (or implement, for that matter) any rules, it has been fairly self-perpetuating.
