On 8/24/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/24/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On 0, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com scribbled:
On 24/08/07, Gary Kirk gary.kirk@gmail.com wrote:
Did I miss something, how can *they* block people from editing? Or do they mean something like a filter blocking access to Wikipedia URLs containing, say, &action=edit in them?
That's what I'm assuming they've done.
Shouldn't be too hard to test. We could just ask someone working for them (there's got to be at least one Wikipedian who works there!) to edit through secure.wikimedia.org and see whether that works; or to just try editing one of the non-En WPs. I very much doubt that their IT department would have written a filter broad enough to catch all that, like ".*wiki.*/&action=edit.*" - too many ways to edit WMF projects and too many other sites that might get hit.
-- gwern bce EAM MKSEARCH KLM evasion RSO varon 11Emc industrial NSWT
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Depending on their setup, you'd think it would be easier to just drop all POST requests to any *.wikipedia.org hosts (plus a few others - but I don't think other projects are a concern here, just Wikipedia). I can't see a use for secure.wikimedia.org to them either, so they would probably have made an outright block on that host (or at least port 443).
Still, only one way to find out :-)
(I should probably say this as well) But also, ".*wiki.*/&action=edit.*" doesn't catch them all either. Remember you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo?action=edit as well. (note no &action, but a ?action) Also remember that even though the edit form is &action=edit, the page save is still &action=submit, so it's still technically possible to make an edit, though completely impractical (you'll find it very hard to save a page when you can't get the source code, you can't get the timestamp of when you hit edit, and when you can't even use a normal browser to save the page, but it's still possible, and that's all that matters)
Cheers,
--Michael Billington
I've worked for a defense department or two, and they also record what you use your computer for, so asking someone who works there to purposely break the ban to see if it works, should come with the knowledge that you may be suggesting, if they don't know this, that they compromise their employment.
There are many instances where military personnel use defense department computers, in those cases they might be banned from accessing the computers.
Almost all Wikipedia editors I have encountered outside of the biology area use on-line sources to the exclusion of almost everything else. A major topic in the biological and earth sciences went up for deletion because the editor wasn't a scientist and couldn't find anything on the web.
Why should soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines be any different than the bulk of Wikipedia editors? Well, probably that they're in uniform, they're not the priviliged few.
KP