2008/5/3 michael west
<michawest(a)gmail.com>om>:
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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