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Ian A Holton

8 Jan 2008 8 Jan '08

7:41 p.m.

Hi all, wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of these and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time, really. Ian [[User:Poeloq]]

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Chris Howie

8 Jan 8 Jan

7:47 p.m.

On Jan 8, 2008 2:41 PM, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote:

wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of these and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time, really.

If the vandalism is persistent enough. I have blocked school IPs for one year before and if the situation didn't improve after the block expired I would block indefinitely. If I block for more than a month I usually send an email to an IT person at the school (if I can locate an address) and let them know that this has happened. I also say that if they can figure out who is responsible and confirm that there has been disciplinary action then I would lift the block early. I've only ever received one response from an email like that, which was something like "thanks for letting us know, but we don't care." -- Chris Howie http://www.chrishowie.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers

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Gary Kirk

7:49 p.m.

It would most certainly not. Cases should be dealt with individually. We do have good editing coming from IP addresses registered to schools, and we have bad edits, as with most shared or public computers.. On 08/01/2008, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of these and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time, really. Ian [[User:Poeloq]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Gary Kirk

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Rjd0060 -

8:43 p.m.

That isn't a good idea at all (sorry) and it goes against guidelines set in the Blocking Policy, as well as the basic principles of Wikipedia. As Gary Kirk said, there are some constructive edits in there, but I'll admit it is sometimes difficult to find them. On Jan 8, 2008 2:49 PM, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk(a)gmail.com> wrote:

It would most certainly not. Cases should be dealt with individually. We do have good editing coming from IP addresses registered to schools, and we have bad edits, as with most shared or public computers.. On 08/01/2008, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of these and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time, really. Ian [[User:Poeloq]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Gary Kirk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Rjd0060 rjd0060.wiki(a)gmail.com

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Ian A Holton

8:50 p.m.

On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 15:43 -0500, Rjd0060 - wrote:

That isn't a good idea at all (sorry) and it goes against guidelines set in the Blocking Policy, as well as the basic principles of Wikipedia. As Gary Kirk said, there are some constructive edits in there, but I'll admit it is sometimes difficult to find them. On Jan 8, 2008 2:49 PM, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It would most certainly not. > > Cases should be dealt with individually. We do have good editing coming > from > IP addresses registered to schools, and we have bad edits, as with most > shared or public computers.. > > On 08/01/2008, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > > > wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) > > IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of these > > and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time, really. > > > > Ian [[User:Poeloq]] > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > WikiEN-l mailing list > > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > > > >

Thanks Rjd0060 for pointing out the policy :) Okay, bad idea... It's just sometimes I get frustrated with vandal fighting during school time as it just gets silly...However, I will keep the flag flying of course :) Ian [[User:Poeloq]]

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Rjd0060 -

9:06 p.m.

Constantly reverting vandalism from schools does get old, but......... Also, did you know about [[WP:ABUSE]]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ABUSE> ? On Jan 8, 2008 3:50 PM, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 15:43 -0500, Rjd0060 - wrote:

That isn't a good idea at all (sorry) and it goes against guidelines set

in

the Blocking Policy, as well as the basic principles of Wikipedia. As

Gary

Kirk said, there are some constructive edits in there, but I'll admit it

is

sometimes difficult to find them. On Jan 8, 2008 2:49 PM, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It would most certainly not. > > Cases should be dealt with individually. We do have good editing

coming

> from > IP addresses registered to schools, and we have bad edits, as with

most

> shared or public computers.. > > On 08/01/2008, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > > > wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) > > IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of

these

> > and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time,

really.

> > > > Ian [[User:Poeloq]] > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > WikiEN-l mailing list > > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > > > >

Thanks Rjd0060 for pointing out the policy :) Okay, bad idea... It's just sometimes I get frustrated with vandal fighting during school time as it just gets silly...However, I will keep the flag flying of course :) Ian [[User:Poeloq]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Rjd0060 rjd0060.wiki(a)gmail.com

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Ian A Holton

9:23 p.m.

On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 16:06 -0500, Rjd0060 - wrote:

Constantly reverting vandalism from schools does get old, but......... Also, did you know about [[WP:ABUSE]]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ABUSE> ? On Jan 8, 2008 3:50 PM, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 15:43 -0500, Rjd0060 - wrote: > > That isn't a good idea at all (sorry) and it goes against guidelines set > in > > the Blocking Policy, as well as the basic principles of Wikipedia. As > Gary > > Kirk said, there are some constructive edits in there, but I'll admit it > is > > sometimes difficult to find them. > > > > On Jan 8, 2008 2:49 PM, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > It would most certainly not. > > > > > > Cases should be dealt with individually. We do have good editing > coming > > > from > > > IP addresses registered to schools, and we have bad edits, as with > most > > > shared or public computers.. > > > > > > On 08/01/2008, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > Hi all, > > > > > > > > wouldn't it be a good idea to start blocking school (not university) > > > > IPs indefinitely. I have rarely seen a good edit come from one of > these > > > > and the time spend on vandal fighting them is just wasted time, > really. > > > > > > > > Ian [[User:Poeloq]] > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > WikiEN-l mailing list > > > > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > > > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > > > > > > > > > > > > Thanks Rjd0060 for pointing out the policy :) Okay, bad idea... It's > just sometimes I get frustrated with vandal fighting during school time > as it just gets silly...However, I will keep the flag flying of > course :) > > Ian [[User:Poeloq]] > > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >

Yes, of course. Thanks, I just don't know every policy page off by heart with all the small details. I wonder when universities will introduce Wikipedia Policy classes ;-) Ian [[User:Poeloq]] London Wikipedia Meetup 12. January 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/London7

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Steve Bennett

9 Jan 9 Jan

6:43 a.m.

On 1/9/08, Rjd0060 - <rjd0060.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

That isn't a good idea at all (sorry) and it goes against guidelines set in the Blocking Policy, as well as the basic principles of Wikipedia. As Gary Kirk said, there are some constructive edits in there, but I'll admit it is sometimes difficult to find them.

Not to mention "Wikipedia says no to high school students" just sounds bad. IMHO we should be putting more effort into brilliant vandalism detection and rollback, to reduce the need for blocking down to an absolute minimum. In our ideal Wikipedia, we wouldn't even block known vandals, because we'd trust our mechanisms to effortlessly detect and roll back all their vandalism. Steve

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Noah Salzman

5:49 p.m.

On Jan 8, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:

IMHO we should be putting more effort into brilliant vandalism detection and rollback

This area is ripe for exploration. Has anyone looked into "Summer of Code" type projects for this sort of thing? The signatures for the great majority of vandalism are not difficult to understand. I would guess that over 50% of vandalism that I revert would be matched by these rules: * Two to three IP edits in short succession * High likelihood that the IP has never edited before * The last edit of the series is not vandalism * The "last - 1" edit has a Lupin regex word * The "last - 1" edit is in a different section so as to not appear in the diff I don't believe ClueBot handles this case and my Perl is teh suk... any volunteers? --Noah--

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Ivan Beschastnikh

10 Jan 10 Jan

12:23 a.m.

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Noah Salzman wrote:

On Jan 8, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:

IMHO we should be putting more effort into brilliant vandalism detection and rollback

This area is ripe for exploration. Has anyone looked into "Summer of Code" type projects for this sort of thing? The signatures for the great majority of vandalism are not difficult to understand.

I was a student and a mentor in summer of code and I think this is an ideal project for this program. I'm not sure if the wikimedia foundation is taking part in the next summer of code, but this should certainly be considered. I think you'll have no dirth of excited cs students to take on some of the more elaborate or time consuming coding projects, however, you do need to find someone to run and organize this program. ivan.

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Steven Mandzik

12:52 a.m.

Great idea. Is there also a summer of editing or article building? Steve On Jan 9, 2008 7:23 PM, Ivan Beschastnikh <ivan(a)cs.washington.edu> wrote:

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Noah Salzman wrote:

On Jan 8, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:

IMHO we should be putting more effort into brilliant vandalism detection and rollback

This area is ripe for exploration. Has anyone looked into "Summer of Code" type projects for this sort of thing? The signatures for the great majority of vandalism are not difficult to understand.

I was a student and a mentor in summer of code and I think this is an ideal project for this program. I'm not sure if the wikimedia foundation is taking part in the next summer of code, but this should certainly be considered. I think you'll have no dirth of excited cs students to take on some of the more elaborate or time consuming coding projects, however, you do need to find someone to run and organize this program. ivan. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Steve Mandzik http://www.swordplay.tv http://www.virtualpetition.org

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Charlotte Webb

15 Jan 15 Jan

3:59 p.m.

On 1/9/08, Steven Mandzik <steven.mandzik(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Great idea. Is there also a summer of editing or article building?

Really, it all depends on how many more summers one actually expects Wikipedia to last. —C.W.

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Ian A Holton

4:02 p.m.

On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 09:59 -0600, Charlotte Webb wrote:

On 1/9/08, Steven Mandzik <steven.mandzik(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Great idea. Is there also a summer of editing or article building?

Really, it all depends on how many more summers one actually expects Wikipedia to last. —C.W.

Charlotte, pessimism isn't the solution, is it? Ian

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Charlotte Webb

18 Jan 18 Jan

4:09 p.m.

On 1/15/08, Ian A Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Charlotte, pessimism isn't the solution, is it?

I suppose there are alternatives. Running several "Summer of..." events concurrently comes to mind. ;) —C.W.

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Noah Salzman

10 Jan 10 Jan

1:03 a.m.

On Jan 9, 2008, at 4:23 PM, Ivan Beschastnikh wrote:

I think you'll have no dirth of excited cs students to take on some of the more elaborate or time consuming coding projects, however, you do need to find someone to run and organize this program.

I can volunteer to be the liaison between the "summer of code" coders and Wikimedia... but I would need someone from Wikimedia to contact me. In 2007 the mentoring organizations had to submit their applications between March 5 and 12th so we would want to get moving sooner than later. --Noah--

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Ivan Beschastnikh

1:13 a.m.

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Noah Salzman wrote:

I can volunteer to be the liaison between the "summer of code" coders and Wikimedia... but I would need someone from Wikimedia to contact me. In 2007 the mentoring organizations had to submit their applications between March 5 and 12th so we would want to get moving sooner than later.

Looks like Wikimedia participated in 2006 and 2007: http://code.google.com/soc/2006/wikim/about.html http://code.google.com/soc/2007/wikimedia/about.html All three students (2 in 2006, and 1 in 2007) were mentored by Brion Vibber who is the release manager for MediaWiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brion_Vibber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brion_VIBBER I bet he would know what the plan is for 2008. Typically, mentoring students is a challenge, so the more mentors Wikimedia has, the more student projects we can attract (and have Google sponsor). ivan.

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Chris Howie

4:46 a.m.

On Jan 9, 2008 12:49 PM, Noah Salzman <nds(a)salzman.net> wrote:

This area is ripe for exploration. Has anyone looked into "Summer of Code" type projects for this sort of thing? The signatures for the great majority of vandalism are not difficult to understand.

But difficult to obtain without flooding. As a developer of two vandalfighting tools (one still unreleased) I can tell you that the most difficult part of developing such a tool is not the AI, but having it be efficient with respect to its network usage. You can't go and download five diffs every time you see an edit on browne, especially not when you're coding it into a tool meant to be used by many users. The www servers would probably choke. (I know there is quite a caching server farm, but to my knowledge diff pages are not so cached, and I don't think anything is cached for logged-in users.) Then there's the fact that diffs aren't even available in an easily-parsable format. We have to download a page full of HTML and rip it apart. Show me a developer that *wants* to code to that spec. What we need is a MediaWiki query API for obtaining the unformatted diff of a revision, with the ability to specify multiple requests at once. Even then we are talking about quite a bit of traffic (especially if the system is run by many users) but far less and in a format much better suited to be analyzed. Really once we have some easy and efficient way to get diffs, it's just a matter of forking spamassassin and writing some quality rules. :) -- Chris Howie http://www.chrishowie.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers

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Risker

9 Jan 9 Jan

6:49 a.m.

On Jan 8, 2008 3:43 PM, Rjd0060 - <rjd0060.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

That isn't a good idea at all (sorry) and it goes against guidelines set in the Blocking Policy, as well as the basic principles of Wikipedia. As Gary Kirk said, there are some constructive edits in there, but I'll admit it is sometimes difficult to find them.

I have to agree. We actually have projects intended to *promote* school editing, under some degree of supervision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects Better, I would think, to have a template email to send to the school itself to tell them of the improper use and to suggest they participate in a supervised project; who knows, we might get some great editors out of it - students and teachers both. Risker

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Luna

8 Jan 8 Jan

11:04 p.m.

There's some old discussion, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archiv… Not to say I don't want to talk about it, but I don't think my personal approach has changed too much, since then. -Luna

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participants (11)

Charlotte Webb
Chris Howie
Gary Kirk
Ian A Holton
Ivan Beschastnikh
Luna
Noah Salzman
Risker
Rjd0060 -
Steve Bennett
Steven Mandzik