Comment by Kim_Bruning

I do know what you mean. At the time when I was still very active, the great majority of the time it really was a smart mob that got misidentified. Very rarely you did get to see an undesirable in-group forming (usually it turned out to be due to misunderstandings, mind). I even wrote a procedure on how to find (among other things) in-groups by exploiting existing natural processes, but I don't think I did a very good job of explaining at the time. (and it has since been rewritten a lot)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:BOLD,_r...

The here-relevant part of the trick was to make a change to a disputed page, and then to observe who reverts it[*]. The person or people who revert it are always going to be interesting in some way.

The new version is actually clearer sometimes, especially the general overview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

[*] A whole lot of caveats apply.