By popular demand (read: because orthzar asked me to), this post will be riddled with TVTropes links. I'd also like to pre-empt any claims that civilisation has a 'z' in it by pointing out that only Americans spell it that way.

I've seen a lot of people throw around the term Faction on this subreddit recently and I think it's worth having a discussion about what exactly that term means and what is and what is not a Faction. I've also seen a lot of people comment on the actions of one or more individuals and attribute those actions to a Faction.

For starters, what exactly is a Faction? Is it merely a group of people, or is it something more?
Do those people need something in common? Perhaps some defining feature or a common purpose? Perhaps they all live together, or have a common ideology?

Let us examine a few examples:
No discussion of Factions in Civcraft would be complete without mentioning the LSIF (Libertarian Socialist International Federation), so I will start with that.
The LSIF is probably the largest Faction on the server by population, whilst also seemingly the most secretive. The LSIF is a Federation of otherwise independent communes which are each organised around a common economic ideology. Individuals must explicitly join and be accepted as a member before they are considered part of a commune which is in turn must explicitly join and be accepted as part of the LSIF.
So lets see:
Common or Official Ideology: Check
Common Location: -
Well defined criteria for membership: Check
Defined membership list: Check

Then there is Columbia (specifically, The Constitutional Republic of Columbia), the most populous individual city on the server and probably the second most populous Faction on the server.
Columbia is a minarchist city-state, a democracy (it's first elections are scheduled but have as of this writing not occurred yet) that appears to have been modelled aesthetically on the United States of America. Individuals living in Columbia are considered to be citizens of Columbia
So, the list:
Common or Official Ideology: Check
Common Location: Check
Well defined criteria for membership: Check
Defined membership list: (not sure about this one)

Now we've reached the unhelpfully named group known commonly as "The Ancaps". Ancap (or AnCap, but not to be confused with ANCAP) is an abbreviation of Anarcho-Capitalism, which is a group of related schools of thought that are a type of Market-Anarchy, it is closely related to but distinct from Mutualism.
The name is unhelpful for a number of reasons:
Not everyone in this group is an Anarcho-Capitalist.
Not all the Anarcho-Capitalists on the server are in the group.

Additionally, I would argue that "The Ancaps", despite being described as one frequently are not in fact a faction:
There is no official or common ideology (many but not all of the people in the group are Anarcho-Capitalists).
The members of this group do not live in the same city and there was no point at which they all lived in the same city.
There is no well defined criteria for being in this group, indeed it is not entirely clear who is and who is not in this group.
There is no well defined membership list, indeed I am not entirely clear how many people there are in this group (although I of course have my own estimates).

To some extent the group sometimes known as "The Ancaps", is composed as players from the previous incarnation of the server, however:
Not all the players from the old server (that still play here) are in this group, and not all the people in the group are from the old server.
Similarly, to some extend the members of "The Ancaps" are composed of the inhabitants of the CKC mumble channel, but again:
Not everyone in the CKC is in "The Ancaps" group and not everyone in the group is in the CKC.

The point, that I have been desperately crawling towards, is that I don't believe "The Ancaps" makes any sense as a label of a group, nor do I believe that this group is a Faction and therefore that it makes no sense to attribute actions of individuals to a non-existent Faction, nor does it make any sense to ascribe motives to it.

Edit: I forgot to point out that there are individuals in this group that are also members of the LSIF and members of this group that are also Columbian and even some individuals that are all three!