| I should probably be the last person to say "There Is No Cabal" but ... Many times, what you actually experience is a variant on the smart mob concept [1], which are enabled by watchlists and diverse central coordination pages[2] . The number of ways you could organize people on wikipedia without them even realizing (let alone being offended by it) by smart use of smart-mobs was (and probably still is) endless. Of course, for a casual observer, these smart mobs look very much like coordinated cabals, even if in reality the individual members don't even know each other. I'm not sure how well this base principle has been documented though. Possibly [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mob [2] eg DRN, ANI, AFD, diverse wikiprojects: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject
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