Cabal
From Encyc
A cabal is a group of people with secret power. It is a term that is used in many internet societies whereby the people in power do not seem to be the people who really control what happens, for example in newsgroups. It is most particularly used in Wikipedia to describe people with a lot of power who control articles, determine what sources are reliable (as a part of controlling articles), decide what policies should be enacted, ban or don't ban people, and who in effect you must be friends with in order to remain on Wikipedia.
In most internet societies you must be friendly with whoever the administrators are in order to do well. You must like the owner, the founder, and all administrators. Indeed, in most cases they are listed, such that people know who they are not allowed to upset. On Encyclopaedia Dramatica they take this one step further and have a rule - upset an administrator and you get banned. It is as simple as that. ED, unlike most internet society, does not pretend to have rules about what you can and can't do. In reality, in all internet societies if you upset the wrong people then you get banned, and in most cases it has nothing to do with you being a bad person but rather just not getting along with the right people. Nonetheless, places like Wikipedia, especially through their arbitration cases, but also through their abuse of people's user pages after they are banned, pretend that a person is bad in a real life sense, smearing their name to hurt their lives and internet experiences generally.
Wikipedia differs to most internet societies in that in theory there is no power structure and everyone is equal. As such, this lends to the creation of a cabal. Whilst this cabal includes people who eventually become administrators, who should have power anyway, the administrators who are in the cabal have a lot more real power than administrators who are not in the cabal. Also, people who are not even administrators can wield a lot of power if they are in the cabal.
An example of how the cabal operates
You see an article with huge factual errors, for example the horrendous errors in Wikipedia's Port Arthur massacre article, whose contents do not even match the references that they use, let alone the facts of the case. So you start to correct the article, using the references provided. You may even include some references that disprove many of the statements made that are entirely unreferenced comments.
If the article was not controlled by the cabal, then you would be able to do it. Someone might comment in the talk page, or they might even revert your changes. But you would have the chance to explain what you had done.
If the article is controlled by the cabal, however, you can be banned immediately, or else harassed until you get banned.
If the article is controlled by the cabal, then they will change what counts as reliable sources to include only what they want to include. They will deny thousands of references which are usually considered to be reliable, but then include a few who usually aren't, just to suit their own needs.
Then on top of that, they will misquote what is said in the sources that they do include, and generally present fiction as fact.
The cabal is concerned with controlling articles, and hence truth, and also controlling who has the power to control truth. Wikipedia is, in essence, a method of transcribing what is true, and by controlling that truth they can determine what is true or not.
As Steve Colbert would say, "Wikipedia controls truthiness".
Because Wikipedia usually gets the top hit on google, and because google is used by most people to search for things, therefore if Wikipedia changes truth about something, then the truth on that issue can be changed globally.
Using the Port Arthur massacre article as an example of truth-changing, when the event happened in 1996 it was well publicised with disbelief that the person who was accused of doing it could have possibly had anything to do with it. Supporting this common sense approach there were many and various investigations that proved that he couldn't have done it. It was routinely believed that he had nothing to do with it, or if he was involved, that his involvement was minor and that he wasn't the shooter (or at least not the main shooter). It simply did not add up for one person to have done all of this, furthermore it did not add up for that person to be mentally disabled - not mentally disturbed but someone who was incapable of having complete conversations or maintaining concentration on simple tasks. Eye witnesses proved that he wasn't the shooter, video tape proved it, and so forth. Cars supposedly used were found elsewhere. Guns supposedly used were found in gun shops years later. It all looked very much false.
The vast majority of internet hits and indeed news hits on the topic indicated the absurdity of believing that the person did it could have done it. However, as a part of the case, an unusual rule was made to require that nothing could be published about it without the court's permission. Ordinarily, such rules are only made for child abuse and sexual assault cases (although it was also made for the Snowtown murders). The rule was perhaps the most severe case of a suppression order in world history.
As a result, old news hits were soon deleted, or else moved to sites that did not count as violations of the suppression order. Internet web pages could not be controlled by the suppression orders, so they were able to remain.
As such, as at when the Wikipedia article was created, there were no "reliable sources" that existed anywhere. Private web sites of copies of original news reports existed, but nothing reliable.
Wikipedia created the article, entirely unreferenced, and then eventually included references that actually said the complete opposite to what Wikipedia said.
Years later, in 2006, at the 10 year anniversary of the massacre, a number of news reports used the Wikipedia article as a reference, since there were no reliable sources elsewhere.
Wikipedia then used these news reports as references in the same article.
As such, Wikipedia was able to present fiction as truth, as proven, essentially, by themselves.
This is how the cabal operates. They can ban 100s of people because they have tried to present the truth on the issue, whilst claiming that they are all the same person (and hence sock puppets) and then they can pretend that there has been no opposition to their point of view.
The cabal is very powerful on Wikipedia.
Who is in the cabal
We can speculate as to who is in the cabal, or even if there is one central cabal or many individual cabals. Its members are also up to speculation. Is SlimVirgin a member? She certainly has a lot of power, beyond what her position is. Is Jayjg a member? He has a lot of power too. What about Raul654? He gets away with most everything. Snowspinner? He can abuse as much as he likes and all is fine. Lulu of the Lotus Eaters gets his own vanity article and gets to abuse people to no end. Antaeus Feldspar gets to engage in serious harassment and stalking.
There are many people who seem to have more power than they should have, who can get away with more than they should be able to get away with, and who can get people hurt when they have done nothing wrong.
Realistically, the definition of a cabal member comes not from their name but from their actions. Anyone who can get away with significantly more than they should be able to get away with, whose actions cannot be questioned, and who anyone who opposes them gets punished or banned, is a member of the cabal.
Some people may be in the cabal then later on not be in the cabal. For example Kelly Martin at various points had a lot of power but nowadays does not have any at all.
