Well, it looks like most of my ideas got shot down, which just proves
that I'm a brilliant visionary and ahead of my time. ;-)
For the record, I wasn't proposing that we "ban" all people who use
hotmail and yahoo addresses. I was proposing that we make it a
requirement that NEW registrants supply an ISP-based email address.
This wouldn't need to be applied retroactively. Moreover, it wouldn't
prevent people from continuing to use a hotmail or yahoo address for
the purposes of correspondence.
My main point, though, is not about hotmail or yahoo accounts. The
central thing I'm trying to say is that there's not much point in
having policies regarding behavior if there's no way to enforce them,
and there's no way to enforce policies when anyone can use an
anonymizer and create a hundred sock-puppet identities for
themselves. Some kind of identity verification system is necessary.
It should be done in a way that is non-intrusive and respects
individual privacy, but SOMETHING needs to happen. Otherwise an
enormous amount of decent people's time will continue to be wasted
trying to cope with the childish behavior of a few trolls.
In lieu of a system for identity verification, what we have at
present is a system that falsely pretends IP numbers can be equated
with individual identities, which is both ineffectual and unfair to
innocent people. It's ineffectual, because abusers can easily get
around an IP ban. It's unfair, because banning an IP number punishes
an entire class of people for the behavior of a single individual.
Arguably my "hotmail-yahoo" approach is a half-baked way of achieving
identity verification. I think Erik Moeller's "permanent cookies"
approach might work better.
Another approach might be to create a _reward_ system for people who
supply a verified identity. We'd have three classes of users:
(1) People who have supplied a verified identity, through a means to
be determined.
(2)People who have registered but HAVEN'T supplied a verified identity.
(3)People who haven't registered at all.
The reward for supplying a verified identity would be greater trust
from the Wikipedia community. You'd get some extra privileges, like
the ability to mark changes as "minor," and you could participate in
a system of rating other WIkipedians similar to the way eBay buyers
and sellers rate one another. There would be a feature that makes it
possible to filter out high-ranking Wikipedians when people look at a
list of "recent changes," thus reflecting the presumption that
highly-rated Wikipedians need less monitoring that people who haven't
earned that level of trust.
People who have registered but haven't supplied a verified identity
would still be able to contribute as they do at present, but they
wouldn't be able to earn "trust" and would therefore always be ranked
at zero.
People who haven't registered would also be treated the same way they
are at present.
Hi everyone.
The arbitration committee has "completed" its guidelines at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_policy . "Completed" in
quotes because while everything that needs to be covered for us to function
probably is covered in one way or another, everything is still subject to
change, and everything will likely be tweaked as we deal with more cases,
gain experience and whatnot.
If any of you plebs, I mean *non-abritrators*, want to look them over,
suggest changes, tell us we're idiots or whatever, then please do so
(preferably on the talk page). Then we'll have a simple yes or no vote
which everybody on the Wikipedia can take part in as to whether to accept
the guidelines or not (bearing in mind they're always subject to change),
and if the vote is yes and Jimbo doesn't object in any way, then we'll be
fully functioning (ie, not needing Jimbo to refer cases to us) and ready to
ban people willy-nilly (that's what we're for, right?).
Best
Lee (Camembert)
I wrote:
> > Have Jimbo appoint a governing committee. This would inevitably be a
>> non-representative subset of the entire community, but having Jimbo as
> > our benevolent dictator is also non-representative.
And Ed Poor responded:
>Sometimes Sheldon has good ideas, but this is not one of those times. He
>is otherwise a fine writer, and I've learned a lot from him.
>
>Centralizing power won't help us make an open-content encyclopedia. In
>fact, the very reason Jimbo and Larry gave up Nupedia was that having a
>central committee guiding all productive activity simply doesn't work.
>(It didn't work in the USSR or any other Marxist socialist state,
>either: no incentive for individual excellence, and no sufficiently
>incorruptible way to coordinate activity)
Thanks for the kind words, Ed, but I think you've misunderstood my
point. Right now power is ALREADY centralized. It's centralized in
the hands of Jimbo, who almost always makes appropriate decisions but
who simply doesn't have the time to adequately govern a community as
large and contentious as Wikipedia has become. Establishing a
committee would DECENTRALIZE power. I'm not proposing this as a
"final solution" to the problem of governance for Wikipedia, merely
as a transitional way of beginning the process of replacing Jimbo's
benevolent-dictatorial rule with something more representative.
A good example of what I mean by "Jimbo's benevolent-dictatorial
rule" was his recent handling of Plautus Satire. Jimbo didn't wait
for the arbitration committee to do more than wring its hands; he
simply reached a point of exasperation and said, "screw it, this
guy's outta here." He did it unilaterally, and I applaud him for
doing it. Nevertheless, he did it the way a dictator makes decisions:
unilaterally, without any pretense that he was acting as a
representative of the Wikipedia community. And this is perfectly
understandable. In the absence of WikiDemocracy, Jimbo *has* to act
as a dictator.
All I'm saying is that establishing a "committee" could be a useful
first step toward establishing something more representative than we
have at present. It would also remove some of the burden from Jimbo.
I see no reason to expect that a "dictatorship by a benevolent
committee" would be any worse than "dictatorship by a benevolent
individual." And it wouldn't be "guiding all productive activity,"
except in the sense that Jimbo is ALREADY "guiding all productive
activity" on the Wikipedia. Jimbo doesn't review and approve every
article; he merely steps in when he sees a problem and fixes it. He
also occasionally issues pronouncements on general policy. That's all
we would want a governing committee to do. It shouldn't, wouldn't and
couldn't dictate all activity on the Wikipedia. What I'm proposing
is therefore quite different from the "Marxist socialist state" you
describe.
>The thing that has propelled Wikipedia to greatness and will forever
>sustain it, is the ability for "anyone, any time" to update it. All we
>need are some simple community norms and a transparent, agreed-upon
>method of enforcing these norms.
There's a contradiction in your language. On the one hand, you're
saying that "anyone, any time" can update the Wikipedia. On the other
hand, you're talking about "enforcing" community norms, and
enforcement by definition means that some people are PREVENTED from
participating. If enforcement exists, then it's not true that
"anyone" can update the Wikipedia. The problem that keeps recurring
with users like Bird is that they take the first promise at its word.
Bird thinks he has a god-given, inherent right to post to the
Wikipedia, because "anyone, any time" can do so. He interprets
attempts to curb his vandalism as the use of "force to prevent free
speech."
I think Wikipedia needs to bite the bullet and realize that we really
DON'T want to allow "anyone, any time" to contribute. As Ed correctly
observes, we need a method of enforcing community norms. This isn't
an impossible task. The Internet is full of examples of discussion
fora that are generally open to the public while still enforcing
rules that keep out trolls and spammers.
--Sheldon Rampton
Hi.
Further to my 'Bird' posting of yesterday.
I see that Bird (and a few aliases) has been banned by Ed - I hadn't realised that sysops could do that
again. I didn't read all of the posting before I
put mine up.
Sorry about that.
____________________________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.as…
Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton(a)verizon.net> wrote:
[among other things, let's]
> Require people to register, providing a verifiable email address
that is not yahoo or hotmail, as a precondition for contributing.
By all means!
And let's ban users from AOL, too, they're all such lamers, and from,
Verizon.net, because they allow a single user to have up to four different
email addresses, and people from "vanity" addresses (their own domains)
because who knows how many email addresses _they_ could have, and anyone from
weird little ISP's I've never heard of like Bomis, because who knows what
_their_ policies might be.
And then let's get rid of the top-posters.
And the people with more-than-four-line SIGs, and the piano organists, and
people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face, and the idiot who praises
in enthusiastic tone every century but this and every country but his own.
And let's require a social security number, credit card number, mother's
maiden name, and proof of sexual orientation as a requirement for
registration.
(Is the irony obvious enough yet, or do I need to add a smiley?)
Erik Moeller wrote:
>Gabriel-
>
>
>>This would defeat all caching, we use 'Vary: Accept-Encoding, Cookie'.
>>
>>
>Yes, if we want to allow anons to set preferences, we'd have to think
>about ways to integrate the cookie system into the cache. That'd be a
>longterm project.
>
We don't give unregistered users the ability to set preferences now, why
should we give it to them if we assign them an "anon" account?
Erik's idea sounds very good to me, although I don't have the technical
expertise to understand all of the implications.
--Michael Snow
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>
>
>>Let's review where the Mediation/Arbitration system currently stands
>>in practice:
>>
>>*The genuine custom for mediation is somewhere between zero and zip.
>>
>> *Mediation is requested as a method of trolling. So far only
>> once successfully.
>>
>> *Mediation is requested and once it starts, one or both of the
>> disputants will insist on behaving as if it were arbitration.
>> (This has happened more than once, but which cases, I will not
>> disclose)
>>
>>
>This suggests that they don't understand what mediation is about.
> Perhaps each party to a mediation should receive an information page
>explaining what mediation is as soon as that process is initiated.
>
For mediators in the real world, one of the big challenges is educating
people on how the process works. They all labor under the misconception
that it's an adversarial process like the rest of the legal system.
--Michael Snow
We should set permanent cookies on every pageview except saves, require
cookies for saving pages, assign random account names (anon2349bx29s) to
anonymous editors, and use cookies to block most users.
We should do away with IP numbers in page histories, recent changes etc.
completely.
We should retain the ability to block by IP in emergencies.
This would address several current problems and have several advantages.
1) Having users' IP numbers published all over the place is a quite
serious privacy violation. It would be trivial to scan recent changes for
hosts with open ports and security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it
reveals geographic information about anonymous editors which they may want
to keep private (such information can be very specific, depending on the
ISP).
2) Banning anonymous users by IP affects anyone who also uses the same IP.
In case of proxies, this may be thousands of individuals. If the first
message we send a new user - because they share a vandal IP - is "You are
banned from editing for serious vandalism", that user is unlikely to
become a regular contributor. Even regulars are frequently pissed off
because they accidentally get blocked.
3) Banning users by IP is also ineffective, as for most users, it is
trivial to get a new dynamic IP address.
4) For repeat vandals, we can set a very high or unlimited expiry without
fear of blocking someone else.
5) Requiring cookies even for anons allows them to change their user
preferences even without creating an account.
6) We can more easily attribute edits to users and easily change anon
edits over to real accounts when people decide to create an account. This
may also address some copyright issues.
Now, regarding some possible criticisms:
1) "They will just delete the cookie and edit away." Yes, some users will
do that. For these users, we should retain the ability to block by IP
(without revealing that IP address to sysops). However, doing so requires
an understanding of how the blocking mechanism works, which most users
don't have. They will have to know how to *remove* cookies, not just
disable them. The user will have to keep deleting the cookie every time it
is re-blocked. And sysops don't have to be hesitant about blocking them,
because no other users can be affected by it. So we can in fact make this
a single-click operation, making it costly for the average user, and cheap
for us.
2) "I have cookies disabled for privacy reasons!" Then you can't be
editing Wikipedia non-anonymously. We already require cookies for signed
in users. Most modern browsers allow enabling cookies on a case-by-case
basis. If a user tries to edit a page without having cookies enabled, we
will let them know that they need to enable them. If you are concerned
about privacy, you should be more concerned about having IP addresses
publicized everywhere, even stored permanently in the page history.
3) "This won't help us to deal with the most egregious vandals." Maybe,
maybe not. A vandal using a script would have to do the same thing as a
malicious user -- get a fresh cookie from a regular pageview, use that
cookie to submit an edit, then discard the cookie. This isn't hard to do,
but I doubt the average kiddie will be able to figure it out. On the other
hand, we can build more extreme anti-vandalism measures on top of this,
like disabling edits by any completely new contributor (= not setting any
new cookies) for a few hours.
All in all, I think this would greatly reduce the time spent on fighting
vandalism, and allow us to focus on more important matters, like creating
an encyclopedia.
Regards,
Erik
There are two problems in restricting access from Yahoo! and Hotmail
email addresses:
The first is that it would limit a lot of honest users. If we allow
anonymous contributions, marked only by IP address, we can surely allow
people with any email address to contribute.
Secondly, doing this would not hinder some people. For example, I can
create any number of email forwards in my domains in a few seconds.
True, you can block the entire domain, but there are some domains with
many legitimate users.
Besides, this isn't what Wikipedia is meant to be. Identity verification
is all well and good, but not when there are so many innocents involved.
I just called the Democratic National Committee to ask
if they would be willing to licence some of their
images under the GFDL (I was hoping to get a photo for
[[Terry McAuliffe]]). Anyway, the person I spoke to
said that "We probably won't have any problems
licencing them to you", but wanted it in writing. So,
I have a question regarding image copyright.
Does an email constitute permission to use these? And
should I store it? That is, what format is necessary
for the permission?
The even better news is this: when I called, I
launched into my little shpiel about how "I'm calling
on behalf of the Wikipedia, we're trying to put
together a free-content encyclopedia". He stopped me
in the middle of my sentence and said "Of course I've
heard of the Wikipedia." It kind of made my day.
Meelar
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools