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Poor, Edmund W wrote:
I recently
recieved this message from a user:
"I'm a regular wikipedia user although i don't have an
account here. I think this site is great and it really helps
me with my college work. But I recently heard of these people
that were talking about wikipedia that they were all
programming a hack for it. So after a little while I found it
was a spider to hunt down all the pages links and change them
to shocks site links or something along those lines. I didn't
know who to tell so I just thought I'd tell an administrator
as they might know who to tell or what to do. Just giving an
advanced warning so you might be able to do something to
protect this wonderful resourse. Apparently they permenantly
change their ip address using some thing (a bit beyond me).
Something like that. I just didn't know what to do. I hope I
didn't embaress myself here. Thanks for your time."
Brett
I'd like to suggest a standard where admins can block any account on
"suspicion of being a bot". This would be an assumption of guilt pending
proof of innocence, so let's talk about it.
We already have it.
Ordinarily, we assume good faith. But if, AFTER making
that initial
assumption (and leaving the door open for anyone - human or bot) to come
in and edit - if we become suspicious, we ought to be able to "stop them
for questioning".
Here's how it might work.
1. Admin gets suspicious of a pattern of edits.
2. (optional step, try to engage user in any number of ways, e.g.,
article talk pages, edit summaries in reverts, etc.)
3. Block account
4. At this point, user / bot can only post to their / its user talk
page.
5. Post a message on the user talk page which (in your opinion) only a
human being could respond to.
6. If they refuse / fail to answer, the presumption stands.
IIRC [[Wikipedia:Bots]] states that admins are already allowed to block
unauthorised bots, including edits which appear to be done with a bot
(time between edits is a key factor) and usernames which include the
word "bot".
Drawbacks:
A. User might be shy about interacting. For example, just wants to
correct spelling - but not talk to other Wikipedians. Maybe they're
embarassed that their English isn't perfect, or they have Asperger's or
are autistic.
I had this happen to me on the Italian wikipedia once when I was using a
Firefox extension that let me use an external editor. Turns out it was
mangling UTF8; I was doing regex image replacement to get rid of
redundant images from Commons and was blocked on the assumption that I
was a bot. I changed IPs and tried again.
B. Evil admin might abuse this policy (gaming the
system) to challenge
someone that they KNOW is a legitimate user.
Evil admins can never win. There are too many good admins, and there is
always email/IRC/talk pages.
Advantages:
C. Shoot first, ask questions later - saves time in an emergency
You should visit #wikipedia-en-vandalism some time.
D. No real harm done to legitimate user: they say the
bold "You have
messages" notice and can click on the link; and simply say, "Jeez,
relax, I'm not a bot."
Yep, common occurance. If the owner of the bot is an admin, they merely
unblock it. In cases where the username is "$(username)'s bot" they
usually leave a note on the talk page to the effect of "is this your
bot? Remember what happened with..."
- --
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