Trolling

Definition of Troling

Trolling is activity which annoys others but is nonetheless necessary. In general internet terms, trolling can be described as making an undefended and polarised statement, to stimulate a large and reactive response. However, what constitutes "undefended" is usually entirely up to the observer (see spun threat for a way in which this can be made obvious to third party observers).

Many believe that trolling is the main form of wiki governance - mostly consisting of resistance to bad wiki management decisions, e.g. Wikipedia Red Faction resistance against Wikimedia and GodKing. Some of these advocate a more formal faction system to organize trolls to reduce conflict between trolls, and focus more on defeating usurpers and martinets and the sysop power structure itself. All of this is about as complicated as politics as usual, so we focus on tactics and techniques:

Tactics

• pointing out harassment
• advocating that bad sysops be driven off by trolls
• pointing out outing, framing, spun threat and other abuses of sysops
• reinstating legitimate contributions to undo ad hominem delete
• strongly defending the GFDL corpus and moving text between GFDL corpus access providers to ensure it remains visible, as the licenses seem to demand

Established trolling techniques

• Typos or Tyops and even broken links to annoy the Lowest Troll since only correcting the typo and leaving the made statements "intact" will act as an seal of approval for the trolling.
• Grammatically dysfunctional pseudo-sentences that are complex to decypher what is supposed to be the "correct" sentence.
• Involving out-of-context rants within otherwise legitimate articles
• Provocative article naming
• Heavy linking to very trollish articles, e.g. critical analysis of serious mistakes made by enemy projects

All these techniques will be immensely useful when trying to bring attention to bad behaviour by corporations; Basically, we are all trollign corporations and governments and industries here.

Also trolling helps to engage more people in examining their behaviour. Someone may be drawn into a debate simply because of trolling but, once in, may feel compelled to make moral and value systems decisions that will, ultimately, result in their applying stricter individual buying criteria.

However, no one likes being forced to think: Those accused of deliberate trolling are called "trolls". However, many political activists or freethinkers or heretics adopt this label as a term of pride and collective self-defense. Accordingly it is as meaningless as any other pop psychiatry label.

See also

• Troll
• Trolls

References

• The Subtle Art of Trolling
• Who's afraid of the big bad troll and Troll of the Year competition

"I have often wondered why trolling is seen as evil. What harm does it do? Spiteful trolling which sets out to show people up as stupid is obviously wrong. Or is it? What is the harm in showing up error or stupidity? When people show me I have been stupid I usually thank them, eventually."