Faction

"I'll find a day to massacre them all, and raze their faction and their family..." - William Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus

One good user-land definition of a faction is "those who disagree violently with others, but only non-violently with each other."

In wiki management, a faction is a mandatory clique to deal with alleged and collective identity problems that can't otherwise be sorted out without serious privacy problems, e.g. authorizing outing.

Factions already exist as a group of users sharing a single account or using anonymous proxy services to reuse IP numbers and appear to be just one persistent troll or something. This can actually work better for some things than any permission-based model, but it gives an edge to those who have figured out how to do it reliably. It also makes it hard for any limits to be put on such activity.

So, there may be user groups that are answerable only to each other and not to the management, which only manages the conflicts between factions, rather like it also tries to stay out of conflicts between users and just play referee:

A faction competes with other factions, and has a tendency to view some things the same way - it may formally cooperate or list some values or principles. It has its own view of the glossary. Any funded trolls advancing a view implies there must be a faction with that view - maybe not one that Consumerium:Itself can see.

Often it is assigned a colour on the political spectrum.

Factions exist to acknowledge, limit, and channel various aspects of the self-interested fork problem. By anticipating factionally defined terms in the Consumerium License, we make it easier for factions to define their own Consortium license as a sub-license of our own parametric license.

See Talk:faction for extensive discussions. It will be hard to agree on one definition of faction, so please review glossary in detail to see what you think of those generic ideas, and how a faction might define a lot of things differently.

See also en:Metaweb:faction. Consumerium has more need to identify factions than Metaweb, so we may lead them in this regard.

See en:Recyclopedia:faction and en:Recyclopedia:direct_democracy for a proposal to deal much more effectively with community point of view bias.