On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:57 PM, michael west michawest@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/3 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/5/3 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an
attempt to
explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point
to it
being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google
cache
may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
I'm not sold on this as anything more than a convenient way of justifying an assumption of it being malicious.
The google cache for a given page updates anything from daily to once a month. If we assume they vandalise, leave it for two minutes, and clean up, then they're doing this with - at best - a 0.15% chance of having the vandalism cached. On a low traffic page (most are), it becomes even smaller.
It seems implausible that anyone would on the one hand be cunning and subtle enough to systematically think of the google cache, but on the other not realise how much of a waste of time this would be.
Dunno plausibility could be argued about all day. Your math is outta sight, in any given instance it would be much much lower than anything resembling 0.15%. AGF would presume that a warning would be inappropriate because we can't see the motive behind the edits. Maybe I am guilty of [[WP:BEANS]] implying that a new game exists, but it is certainly a strange and annoying kind of editing when somebody vandalises, restores, vandalises and restores ad infinitum with editors stuck (a) attempting to consider what motive lie behind the edits and (b) [[WP:AIV]] would surely question test edit warnings that aren't disruptive.
mike
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I think the first thing to do with such edits would be to refer the editor to the sandbox (which the lower level test/vandalism templates do anyway), since they may just be making test edits to see what happens. Of course, if they ignore that advice and persist, stronger warnings and blocks could follow as normal. I don't see any reason or need for special handling here.