On 2008.04.03 16:26:45 -0400, WJhonson(a)aol.com scribbled 0.6K characters:
In a message dated 4/3/2008 11:24:51 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com writes:
I have seen fair share of article butchering through mass
redirectification.>>
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Could you put this in language my third-grade intellect can understand?
Do you mean something like gutting an article with a simple redirect to
another article?
Wouldn't the article history contain the original article, that could be at
least saved to user-space?
Will
Yes, in theory that could be done. And in theory undeletion is a useless admin power as we
could just copy stuff from the database dumps, and in theory we could add all sorts of
barrier to registration and reduce vandalism that way, and in theory we don't need any
editing features in MediaWiki - just let people find buffer overflows in PHP and do their
editing of the database through shellcode.
In practice, of course, redirection is as good as deletion, except in the rare case
someone finds a discussion about it or has a reason to wonder where the heck her article
went. It only has to happen once, and there's plenty of ways. A bot might edit it, or
perhaps you get distracted and don't visit Wikipedia for, say, three days? It's
hard to tell the difference between a page you're not seeing any edits to because
nobody is editing it, and a page you're not seeing any edits to because it's now a
redirect...
(I'd note that one good way of fixing this problem would be to improve the raw
watchlist - filter out or otherwise mark redirects. You could then combat the above by
keeping your watchlist clean of redirects and occasionally scanning for untoward new
ones.)
--
gwern
FIPS140 the Enforcers Defcon supercomputer GSGI SAW DEVGRP Texas Yakima