On 10/11/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/11/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/10/06, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Given that these mailing lists are available to be read by potential adversaries, it's probably not a good idea to speculate here about what those countermeasures might be...
One important point that escapes many is that when you try to explain "it's a website the readers can edit", some people immediately go OH NOEZ and list every obvious reason it can't possibly work and the enterprise is provably doomed. Wikipedia cannot possibly work in theory.
Yet somehow it keeps working, pretty much. This is because every single one of the doomsday scenarios has happened and keeps happening and we've learnt to deal with them as part of the normal course of events.
We thought that about Usenet spam too, once.
We lost that one.
That's because Usenet didn't have any good way of reacting quickly to changing threats, or of undoing actions taken by users. Wikipedia has the advantages that any action can be undone faster than it can be done, and that the whole system is centrally managed. If all else fails, the system can be put in read-only mode to give people time to come up with a fix.