Wiki Mental Illness Phenomenon

I don't know what else to call it.

The phenomenon where an individual will fight, uselessly and senselessly, against automated scripts, for days, weeks, months, and years... Trying to no avail to change pages that can't be changed, but insisting anyway.

A phenomenon where the individual seems to lose all sense of reality, all sense of reason, and all sense of sanity.

The equation comes down to: GrammarVandal -vs- SharkBot

I'd assume that GrammarVandal uses a bot also.

[As far as I can tell, he might be using a 'bot to submit his often-daily batches of changes, but the initiation of a given batch appears to be manual. Sustaining EditWars on individual pages appears to be entirely manual, which probably makes him worthy of a combined award for "Most Pointless Activity in the Face of Utter Futility" and "Biggest Waste of Time, Ever".] -- DaveVoorhis

The illness actually isn't that he thinks he'll succeed in making the edits. The illness is the pleasure derived from knowing that all of his edits pollute the RecentChanges page, the spamming of which degrades the effectiveness of the wiki to the point of inconsequence, and is why this Wiki needs to filter the dang thing out. To paraphrase: if GrammarVandal makes an edit, and SharkBot corrects the damage, and nobody is around to see it, then did it really happen?

Who knows why people do what they do? Perhaps it gives them a (false) sense of control that they lack elsewhere in life. It would be nice to send Dr. Phil over to the edit warriors' houses, but that won't happen. Roughly 2 percent of the population is crakers, and about 15% of population is borderline.