[WikiEN-l] Actual Problems with WP:V

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

On 2008.04.03 16:26:45 -0400, WJhonson at aol.com scribbled 0.6K characters:
>
> In a message dated 4/3/2008 11:24:51 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
> wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com writes:
>
> I have  seen fair share of article butchering through mass
> redirectification.>>
>
> --------------------------
> 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
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