On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Unforgettableid
<unforgettableid(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A) Did I go too far when I did all the research I
described above? Do you
yourself often use the Range Contributions tool[4] for looking at vandals' ISPs'
contributions?
Most of the people here aren't enwiki vandal hunters. Why don't you
ask wikien-l instead?
B) What do you think are the chances that the same
person made both the
first[1] and the second[7] vandalistic edits? The IP addresses' binary
representations are quite different.
Possible but unlikely. If you look at the reverse DNS, one is
cpe-174-105-248-31.insight.res.rr.com and one is
cpe-174-106-099-246.nc.res.rr.com. The latter looks like it's
probably from RoadRunner in North Carolina, while the former has
"insight" instead of "nc" -- not sure what that is, but they're
probably geographically different groups of customers.
C) Why did no anti-vandalism software automatically
revert either edit?
This list is for MediaWiki development and Wikimedia systems
adminstration. The various auto-reverting bots are maintained by
entirely different people, and you should ask them.
D) When I look at the history[9] of [[Patrick
Stump]], I see that there were
fourteen edits between 06:51 and 07:03, most vandalism. Yet the vandalistic
edits come from a variety of IP addresses and usernames. The IP addresses
differ widely from each other. Why is this?
Maybe because they're totally different people?
E) When comparing two vandals' edits in other
situations, is there any quick
way for editors to find out both IPs' hostnames, User-Agents, Accept-Charset
strings, Accept-Language strings, screen resolutions, and/or IP geolocation
results? I do very little vandalism removal, so I myself am not sure.
You can find out their reverse DNS and whois information through
standard tools, such as the command-line utilities "dig" and "whois"
or various websites that will run them for you. Geolocation services
are provided by a variety of websites using different databases of
varying quality. The rest is not available to unprivileged users,
although some is available to checkusers (at least for logged-in
users, dunno about anonymous).
F) Which netblocks do the most vandalism and the
least useful editing? Which
cities? Which entire countries? Should those netblocks, cities, and countries
be forced to log in before editing?
That's a policy decision that would be made either by Wikimedia or
individual wikis, not by devs/sysadmins, so this isn't the right list.
G) Wouldn't it be cool if some web browsers or
ISPs would tell Wikipedia what a
contributor's PPPoE username was whenever the contributor made an edit?
That's not very useful for people who don't use PPPoE, which is
probably a large majority. We do have arrangements with some ISPs,
like AOL, to send X-Forwarded-For headers so we can display users'
real IP addresses rather than those of proxies. It's very unlikely
that ISPs would be willing to give us their customers' names -- their
customers pay them, we don't.
If you reply to only one of A), B), C), D), E), F), or
G) then please use a
different subject line than I used. And add a "(was: ...)" tag at the end of
the subject line. That way, it'll be easier for others to follow just the parts
of the discussion that they want to follow.
I don't think this discussion will go on for much longer anyway, and
people would not appreciate it if I posted seven times as many
responses to a thread that's largely off-topic to begin with.