User blog comment:YouTube Video Maker/Mother(sandwich) sh*t just got real/@comment-27516045-20191115200821/@comment-34876209-20191115230304

"Well, a good test to see if it's Edwin will be:"

"Does another new account show up to the wiki in the next few days and appear to be troling p-bot?"

You know this place gets thousands of viewers every day, right? Careful not to give any of them ideas. Even if only 0.1% would do it, that would still mean there'd be a few willing to try.

With that precaution put to the wayside, we should have a formal definition of what it means to "troll" in the first place. When you start delving into even the fundamental semantics of the word, you start running into logistical dilemnias that severely impede a formal definition.

I'll begin with the Wikipedia page for an Internet troll, which reads as follows:


 * "In Internet slang, a troll is a person who starts quarrels or upsets people on the Internet to distract and sow discord by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing tangential discussion, whether for the troll's amusement or a specific gain."

Now this definition may seem straight-forward, but already it's riddled with problems. For instance, what really is "normalizing tangential discussion"? You see, if such a troll was successful enough at marginilizing serious discussions to the extent that he/she could bring irrelevant blog posts to the the top of a hypothetical "popular blog posts" leaderboard, he/she would no longer be "normalizing" tangential discussion, but merely continuing a pattern that became normal long before the given post was created.

You see, when irrelevant discussion becomes the norm, it fails  by definition  to be irrelevant anymore, except when held to the standard and expectations of the wiki. And here, there doesn't seem to be any rules against extraneous discussions or a guy going around asking people for a sandwich.

It would be wise to come up with a formal definition for trolling, so as to have a thorough guide to the identification and elucification of any potential vagabounds that should fancy this wiki as their next target. Then, it can be added to the policy page so we can agree on something.