Tired of your old games where you can shoot people, decapitate them or drag them through the mud and destroy all sense of humanity? Why not go and spend time on recent changes patrol instead?
In recent changes patrol of a wiki, you'll get real time interaction with real vandals who need to be dealt with swiftly and with complete intolerance. Send them packing with warning notices and scold them with the high moral ground upon which you stand. And if you get to admin (which every self-respecting patroller sure wants) you get to block the ever-present and menacing vandals who threaten to destroy the site! In this role you are entitled to feel shocked, angered, offended and put out. And what's best, you get to resolve these feelings by taking it out on the vandals!
What's wrong with this scenario? A lot. The so-called vandals are fellow human beings and in many cases, you may just have piqued their ire with your own actions. The way in which you define a vandal is also very telling about your own personality. Just because somebody bugs you or writes silly language in a wiki page does not necessarily mean that the person is a vandal. It may well be your reaction that determines the transformation of someone who is just being silly or is temporarily lurking into a full-blown and irritable vandal who clings fiercely through a sense of dented pride or outrage.
The reality, however, is that the vandal view is encouraged by wikis. With few staff and with the open ability to edit a wiki any way one wishes, the term "vandal" simply seems so apt and so motivating to that free, unpaid group of self-appointed guardians of the recent changes patrol. In turn, that group of guardians gets a great sense of ownership over the site. Is this bad? Yes and no. No, because without this dedication, a wiki site could look a mess. Yes, because this can flip into megalomania and create a sub-culture that speaks in terms of "punishment", "ousting", "shaming" and "banning". Where the patrollers are both judge and jury, it is easy for a sense of imminent site destruction to pervade the site and an escalation in the sense of urgency to avoid this outcome occurs. In turn, this vigilante bravado influences every contributor's attitudes toward so-called vandals and makes everybody feel their hard work is under attack and to feel dependency on the guardians of patrol to keep it all in shape.
When one also has patrollers who lack maturity (not always the very young), the risk that the whole thing is just a game to them increases and the real humans on the other side are merely targets to be rid of. Speed rather than agility takes over in patrol as a gun-like rat-a-tat-a-tat drives them ever onward through patrol. In the process, they miss poor grammatical edits because these appear inoffensive, they miss good contributors (fail to praise and cultivate them) and they miss the whole point of being a part of the wiki community -- all because they are hunting rather than editing. Find out and destroy those who bother them, seek out the vandal and destroy. In this scenario, nobody ever learns the road of understanding, compassion, fairness and calm.
Wikis are not all they are cracked up to be. In fact, many wikis are cracking up.
