Consumerium:Contributor

A Consumerium Contributor is any troll or member of the Consumerium social club (to be troll-friendly, assume that trolls are members of nothing) who is not in the Consumerium Governance Organization or in any way providing Central Services or other Consumerium maintenance, and not just ordinary Consumerium end users.

The term Contributor thus includes Consumerium developers, activeConsumerium end users like beta testers and public relations folk, and the Consumerium researchers.

The reason for this definition is to put Contributors on a higher plane than ordinary end users in the Consumerium License, and make them count for more in a consensus than someone who just walks in off the street and may be a mole.

There are strong reasons to prefer recruiting those who are considered, or who act as, trolls in other internet forums (Meatball Wiki, Meta-Wikipedia and Wikipedia itself). Often, the people labelled troll are the most disciplined and high-integrity contributors, and those who call them that are the stupidest. This is not a tautology, quite, although trolls revel in saying it is. An illustrative case is that of Bill Palmer, who wrote in mid-1999 of an exchange where trollishness was perhaps mutually observed:

"Instead of troubling himself with attempting

a reasoned refutation of my assertions, he posted some peevish remarks directed at me as a person rather than at the many ideas in my article.

In the course of his unfriendly comments, he said

something that made it clear he was accusing me of being a troll. In fact, he actually used the term "troll" as he did this.

That's right. Me, Bill Palmer, "a troll"!

The person who has posted over 6,000 articles,

most by far to generally appropriate newsgroup forums and has done so proudly under his own name every time.

The net writer who has generated follow-up from many

thousands of DIFFERENT readers and who has written a significant percentage of the best known original Usenet articles of the past few years.

The proud owner of "Dejamountain", the only personal

archive famous by its own name.

My critic's style of unjust name-calling bothers me

because it smacks of witch hunting, certainly so when we throw all reason out the window and start applying vague criteria defining "trolls" and "trolling" to suit our own whims by unfairly branding someone who rubs our nose out joint with his or her controversial (but on-topic) articles.

Further, a few months back when I posted another

original article in a different newsgroup someone did in fact call me a troll then too. I thought at the time that the epithet was incredibly unreasonable and I still think that."

- http://xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/_/to_catch_a_troll.txt

In order to avoid such debates, it would be ideal to simply call every Contributor a "troll" as a condition of editing. That is, if you are not willing to cheerfully embrace the label and role of the troll, you should not edit here! That would be an appropriate attitude filter and would remove much psychiatry in advance.