From: "Fl Celloguy" flcelloguy@hotmail.com
What's wrong with not letting the 25 million + AOL users not edit anonymously? I thought the whole point of Wikipedia was that anyone could edit - this has already been discussed extensively on the Village Pump, and this is taking us one step closer to the precipice of not letting anonymous users edit. We don't want to stop anonymous editing for a significant portion of users.
I hold this truth to be self-evident: the whole point of Wikipedia is to produce a free encyclopedia.
To secure this goal, policies and practices have been instituted. Whenever current policies and practices becomes destructive of this goal, it is appropriate that the community institute such new practices as seem as to them shall seem most likely to secure the goal of producing a free encyclopedia.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that practices long established, such as zero- threshold editing should not be changed for light and transient causes.
On 10/19/05, dpbsmith@verizon.net dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that practices long established, such as zero- threshold editing should not be changed for light and transient causes.
Considerations like this are one reason I won't be submitting my patch to CVS anytime soon. The possibility of widespread abuse, as a means of coercing editors to sign up and log in, is one I wouldn't want to countenance.
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Considerations like this are one reason I won't be submitting my patch to CVS anytime soon. The possibility of widespread abuse, as a means of coercing editors to sign up and log in, is one I wouldn't want to countenance.
You are an admin. it is posible for you to pull any such blocks. Incerdenterly do you remeber Mr treason? We had to block everyone who edited from AOL.
-- geni
On 10/19/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Considerations like this are one reason I won't be submitting my patch to CVS anytime soon. The possibility of widespread abuse, as a means of coercing editors to sign up and log in, is one I wouldn't want to countenance.
You are an admin. it is posible for you to pull any such blocks.
Then many people would decide that I was a rogue admin. No, I prefer not to risk sabotaging the wiki. If some other developer wants to submit such a patch, let him, but it won't be me.
Incerdenterly do you remeber Mr treason? We had to block everyone who edited from AOL.
This seems a little unlikely.
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Then many people would decide that I was a rogue admin.
Doubtful. No one concluded that when I've pulled blocks in the past.
This seems a little unlikely.
It happened. I think it was [[User:Theresa Knott]] who put the block in place.
-- geni
I hold this truth to be self-evident: the whole point of Wikipedia is to produce a free encyclopedia.
To secure this goal, policies and practices have been instituted. Whenever current policies and practices becomes destructive of this goal, it is appropriate that the community institute such new practices as seem as to them shall seem most likely to secure the goal of producing a free encyclopedia.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that practices long established, such as zero- threshold editing should not be changed for light and transient causes.
"Light and transient"!! are you serious? These vandals waste so much of our good editors time and effort that it is an extreme problem.
We have to ask ourselves "is wikipedia a social experiment or not?"
answers; YES! Then let absolutely everyone edit freely (well everyone who has a computer with internet and is not blocked by other means, including being on an IP shared with a blocked vandal) and live by our artificial rules and see what happens.
NO! This is a project to make the best encyclopedia ever, policy and procedure should evolve as our problems evolve, and vandalim is one of the biggest problems, it discredits us, wastes our time, and puts off good users. The least we could do is be able to block vandals properly when they do surface.
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
This is a project to make the best encyclopedia ever, policy and procedure should evolve as our problems evolve, and vandalim is one of the biggest problems
You might think so, but it isn't. Even the most vandalized articles on Wikipedia are well under control. The category "Protected against vandalism", which contains a list of all pages currently with a vprotect template, is almost empty of real articles.
It's easy to get the Chicken Licken attitude if you don't look at the actual facts.
Vandalism is in no way, shape or form a serious ongoing threat to Wikipedia.
Martin, I think you're confusing anonymous editors with vandals. We're allowing anonymous users to edit so there's a low treshhold to contributing. Kill that, and you take away a large pool of users who just haven't signed for various legitimate reasons.
We can deal with the vandals. Forcing valid editors to do something they don't want to is a bad way to fight vandalism.
--Mgm
Martin, I think you're confusing anonymous editors with vandals. We're allowing anonymous users to edit so there's a low treshhold to contributing. Kill that, and you take away a large pool of users who just haven't signed for various legitimate reasons.
We can deal with the vandals. Forcing valid editors to do something they don't want to is a bad way to fight vandalism.
--Mgm
I am not confusing anything, I may have just not made myself clear. The proposed change is proving rather popular at the moment, see Wikipedia:Blocking policy proposal .
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
Martin, I think you're confusing anonymous editors with vandals. We're allowing anonymous users to edit so there's a low treshhold to contributing. Kill that, and you take away a large pool of users who just haven't signed for various legitimate reasons.
We can deal with the vandals. Forcing valid editors to do something they don't want to is a bad way to fight vandalism.
Amazing! We agree on something. Vandals are a fact of life here, but it is a stretch to assume that every anonymous editor is a vandal.
Ec
From: Tony Sidaway:
You might think so, but it isn't. Even the most vandalized articles on Wikipedia are well under control. The category "Protected against vandalism", which contains a list of all pages currently with a vprotect template, is almost empty of real articles.
It's easy to get the Chicken Licken attitude if you don't look at the actual facts.
Vandalism is in no way, shape or form a serious ongoing threat to Wikipedia.
Thats because we only protect pages under fairly extreme circumstances. The real vandalism problem is the one we don't see, the articles that aren't being watched closely (i.e. the ones that make up the bulk of the ~750,000 articles we have).
The most vandalised pages are ok because lots of people watch them, only just a few minutes ago I reverted some serious one-off vandalism on a fairly important article that was done over 2 weeks ago. But even high profile articles are not immune to vandalism, if you monitor the Bill Gates article it is painfully obvious why it was so badly criticised; because it is a constant war between vandalism/crap editing and reverting back, any good editing just get eroded away.
The other problem that vandalism causes is that it wastes so much time of editors who would otherwise being making articles better rather than stopping them being destroyed. Plus, as I said, vandalism deters good editors from taking us seriously and contributing.
The real cost is the one you don't see. Not the one you see in recent changes.
Martin
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
From: Tony Sidaway:
You might think so, but it isn't. Even the most vandalized articles on Wikipedia are well under control. The category "Protected against vandalism", which contains a list of all pages currently with a vprotect template, is almost empty of real articles.
[...]
Thats because we only protect pages under fairly extreme circumstances. The real vandalism problem is the one we don't see, the articles that aren't being watched closely (i.e. the ones that make up the bulk of the ~750,000 articles we have).
But we do see those changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges
But even high profile articles are not immune to vandalism, if you monitor the Bill Gates article it is painfully obvious why it was so badly criticised; because it is a constant war between vandalism/crap editing and reverting back, any good editing just get eroded away.
Reverting vandalism is an almost transparent activity. When I was regularly editing the Dubya article I'd just ignore it completely, edit on through, and the RC patrollers and other interested parties took care of cleaning it up.
Article quality in the Gates article, we discussed last week. Nothing at all to do with vandalism.
The other problem that vandalism causes is that it wastes so much time of editors who would otherwise being making articles better rather than stopping them being destroyed.
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we have doing RC patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are idling. A load of other editors will be involved at any one time in fixing recent change, but if you look at the deletion log and see who is doing deletions and restores, you can get a maximum value for the number of editors who have been on active patrol today. 57 editors are responsible for the last 500 deletions--which covers the last 9 hours. But we have many thousands of editors contributing every day. For instance, of the last 500 edits, there were 287 unique usernames or IPs.
There may be many editors involved in dealing with vandalism, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the resources we have available.
Plus, as I said, vandalism deters good
editors from taking us seriously and contributing.
The real cost is the one you don't see. Not the one you see in recent changes.
Martin
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we have doing RC patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are idling. A load of other editors will be involved at any one time in fixing recent change, but if you look at the deletion log and see who is doing deletions and restores, you can get a maximum value for the number of editors who have been on active patrol today. 57 editors are responsible for the last 500 deletions--which covers the last 9 hours. But we have many thousands of editors contributing every day. For instance, of the last 500 edits, there were 287 unique usernames or IPs.
There may be many editors involved in dealing with vandalism, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the resources we have available.
The deletion log will only show admins who are carrying out the deletion. It won't show non-admins who are monitoring recent changes, manually reverting vandalism, and tagging speedies. It doesn't make sense to compare the number of admins performing deletetions to recent changes by everyone.
I also don't know how to interpret what the IRC numbers mean ... right now there are 32 people in #wikipedia-en, but I'm certain there are many more editors than that active right now.
On 10/19/05, Andrew Venier avenier@venier.net wrote:
The deletion log will only show admins who are carrying out the deletion.
Undoubtedly. But the bottleneck is the admins. There have been an absolute maximum of 57 admins doing RC deletes and restores in the past nine hours. It's a piddling number.
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Undoubtedly. But the bottleneck is the admins. There have been an absolute maximum of 57 admins doing RC deletes and restores in the past nine hours. It's a piddling number.
However New pages patrol is less of a problem (lower trafic and vandalims is more obvious) than RC patrol.
-- geni
From: "Tony Sidaway"
But we do see those changes:
If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously wrong, it is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through, sure its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much for an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.
Reverting vandalism is an almost transparent activity. When I was regularly editing the Dubya article I'd just ignore it completely, edit on through, and the RC patrollers and other interested parties took care of cleaning it up.
Article quality in the Gates article, we discussed last week. Nothing at all to do with vandalism.
Sorry, in this case I was using vandalism as a blanket term for bad edting/POV pushing etc. not just outright vandalism, and as has been discussed, this is exactly the type of bad editting that erodes articles.
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we have doing RC patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are idling. A load of other editors will be involved at any one time in fixing recent change, but if you look at the deletion log and see who is doing deletions and restores, you can get a maximum value for the number of editors who have been on active patrol today. 57 editors are responsible for the last 500 deletions--which covers the last 9 hours. But we have many thousands of editors contributing every day. For instance, of the last 500 edits, there were 287 unique usernames or IPs.
Like I said, it is a fact that RC patrollers don't pick up everthing, I don't see how you could possibly argue otherwise.
Anyway, this has little to do with the blocking proposal it originated from and I can't win this arguement anyway because there isn't a chance in hell that the almighty one would ever let editting rights be tightened up at all.
Regards
Martin
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously wrong, it is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through, sure its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much for an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.
Show me some old vandalism.
Sorry, in this case I was using vandalism as a blanket term for bad edting/POV pushing etc. not just outright vandalism, and as has been discussed, this is exactly the type of bad editting that erodes articles.
Yes. The point is, that isn't vandalism.
From: "Tony Sidaway"
Show me some old vandalism.
Well I just reverted a 15 day old 3/4 page blank of [[Complement good]]. Let me guess, it doesnt count as vandalism because it might have been a good faith blanking?
Yes. The point is, that isn't vandalism.
Yeah, but it doesnt matter what you label it, an edit either makes wikipedia better or worse.
Martin
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
From: "Tony Sidaway"
Show me some old vandalism.
Well I just reverted a 15 day old 3/4 page blank of [[Complement good]]. Let me guess, it doesnt count as vandalism because it might have been a good faith blanking?
Not plausible. Looks like an obvious case of vandalism to me.
(On Bill Gates)
Yes. The point is, that isn't vandalism.
Yeah, but it doesnt matter what you label it, an edit either makes wikipedia better or worse.
Well we're talking about vandalism, here, not sloppy editing. Specifically the suggestion further up the thread was that we needed to tackle vandalism because it's so serious, and you said "This is a project to make the best encyclopedia ever, policy and procedure should evolve as our problems evolve, and vandalim is one of the biggest problems, it discredits us, wastes our time, and puts off good users. The least we could do is be able to block vandals properly when they do surface."
Personally I think that bad writing and driving away newcomers are the two worst problems of the project. The former can be fixed over time with effort. The latter will kill us if we keep it up. Compared to those, vandalism doesn't even count as a blip on the radar screen.
From: "Tony Sidaway"
Personally I think that bad writing and driving away newcomers are the two worst problems of the project. The former can be fixed over time with effort. The latter will kill us if we keep it up. Compared to those, vandalism doesn't even count as a blip on the radar screen.
Agree, but I think bad faith editing causes these problems. What do you think are the best methods to attract new users? Personally I think that if we only allowed editing from a registered with email account, the number of good productive editors would increase as our credibility would greatly increase. I know that is blasphemous and against wiki principle, but frankly I don't give a s*** about wiki principle, I am only here to make a good encyclopedia.
I think it is only a matter of time before a clone of wikipedia pops up with restricted editing, gains some popularity (especially with academics), and over time makes Wikipedia start to look like the urban dicionary.
p.s. I do love WIkipedia, really.
Martin
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
I think it is only a matter of time before a clone of wikipedia pops up with restricted editing, gains some popularity (especially with academics), and over time makes Wikipedia start to look like the urban dicionary. Martin
Not likely. The shear size of wikipedia means you have to have a fair size user base to even mentain it.
-- geni
I think that a system that uses email addresses as validation is too easy to game. Look at the popularity of sites such as Spaminator and Bugmenot. I also think that a system that forces one to provide an email address will drive away many potential good users. If someone is so determined to vandalize Wikipedia, they'll find a way around any system. A potential good user isn't as persistent. I know that I probably wouldn't have started editing under an account if I was forced to provide an email address. Most likely, that would have been the end of my Wikipedia use.
[[:en:User:Bratsche|Ben]]
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote: <snip>
Personally I think that if
we only allowed editing from a registered with email account, the number of
good productive editors would increase as our credibility would greatly increase. I know that is blasphemous and against wiki principle, but frankly I don't give a s*** about wiki principle, I am only here to make a good encyclopedia.
p.s. I do love WIkipedia, really.
Martin
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- Bratsche-It means "viola!"
It's not a hard and fast thing -- sure, someone determined to vandalize could still do it, but how many vandals are that determined. Putting a small additional hurdle will help.
On 10/19/05, Ben E. bratsche1@gmail.com wrote:
I think that a system that uses email addresses as validation is too easy to game. Look at the popularity of sites such as Spaminator and Bugmenot. I also think that a system that forces one to provide an email address will drive away many potential good users. If someone is so determined to vandalize Wikipedia, they'll find a way around any system. A potential good user isn't as persistent. I know that I probably wouldn't have started editing under an account if I was forced to provide an email address. Most likely, that would have been the end of my Wikipedia use.
I seriously doubt requiring someone to create a throwaway email account in order to sign up for Wikipedia would change anything. By this, I mean I doubt it'd stop any vandals, and I doubt it'd drive away any users (although it might discourage casual users from creating an account, which could be argued as a good or a bad thing).
On 10/20/05, Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com wrote:
It's not a hard and fast thing -- sure, someone determined to vandalize could still do it, but how many vandals are that determined. Putting a small additional hurdle will help.
On 10/19/05, Ben E. bratsche1@gmail.com wrote:
I think that a system that uses email addresses as validation is too
easy
to game. Look at the popularity of sites such as Spaminator and Bugmenot. I also think that a system that forces one to provide an email address
will
drive away many potential good users. If someone is so determined to vandalize Wikipedia, they'll find a way around any system. A potential good user isn't as persistent. I know that I probably wouldn't have started editing under an account if I was forced to provide an email address.
Most
likely, that would have been the end of my Wikipedia use.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
From: Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org
I seriously doubt requiring someone to create a throwaway email account in order to sign up for Wikipedia would change anything. By this, I mean I doubt it'd stop any vandals, and I doubt it'd drive away any users (although it might discourage casual users from creating an account, which could be argued as a good or a bad thing).
It would mean it would generally take up to 10 minutes to create a new account, as opposed to just seconds to edit anonymously from a new IP. For pure vandals/blocked users it would get tiring after a while, if they were all blocked in seconds.
Jay.
On 10/20/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org
I seriously doubt requiring someone to create a throwaway email account
in
order to sign up for Wikipedia would change anything. By this, I mean I doubt it'd stop any vandals, and I doubt it'd drive away any users (although it might discourage casual users from creating an account, which could be argued as a good or a bad thing).
It would mean it would generally take up to 10 minutes to create a new account, as opposed to just seconds to edit anonymously from a new IP. For pure vandals/blocked users it would get tiring after a while, if they were all blocked in seconds.
Jay.
Eh, if you just want to delay account creation, delay the account creation for 10 minutes.
I don't think this would stop many pure vandals/blocked users, and don't forget they could still create 500 accounts during those 10 minutes. It would stop casual editors though, and it'd even stop some regulars who just don't feel like logging in from another location (or maybe don't want to log in from work or from an untrusted computer).
If you're going to stop allowing anonymous editing, might as well go all the way and require some better authentication than just a throwaway email account. Do a six-degrees thing like Google does with gmail, for instance. Want edit Wikipedia? Send in your application here.
And you know what, Wikipedia would probably still succeed. In some ways it'd be better, and in some ways it'd be worse. But the real problem is that you'd lose a lot of users. There'd almost certainly be a fork.
Maybe there will be a fork anyway. If so, maybe a better solution would be for Wikimedia to run both versions - one collaborative encyclopedia for the elitists to edit and another one for everyone to edit. Of course, I seem to recall that Bomis already tried that.
Anthony
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Personally I think that bad writing and driving away newcomers are the two worst problems of the project. The former can be fixed over time with effort. The latter will kill us if we keep it up. Compared to those, vandalism doesn't even count as a blip on the radar screen.
We deal quickly with real vandals because we all know what they are and we don't need to argue about them. Primarily, the efforts of vandals fail a test of basic relevance.
Even a POV pushing neo-nazi passes the relevance test. The articles that he acts upon will have some connection with his political views, and he is only rarely found doing anything with non-political articles.
Ec
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Show me some old vandalism.
How is he meant to find it? Dig out the hiostory of [[Sathya Sai Baba]] there was a period of a couple months where it was getting vandalised day in day out at about lunch time. The vandalism almost always lasted until I loged in and picked it up on my watchlist
-- geni
On 10/19/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Show me some old vandalism.
How is he meant to find it? Dig out the hiostory of [[Sathya Sai Baba]] there was a period of a couple months where it was getting vandalised day in day out at about lunch time. The vandalism almost always lasted until I loged in and picked it up on my watchlist
Yep, we've all got articles on our watchlists. It's an easy, almost painless way of dealing with vandalism. We fix it almost without thinking about it.
But if [[Sathya Sai Baba]] ever became a serious vandalism target, just protect it and slap a vprotect template on it. A few days of that usually deals with the problems.
Hey folks,
Your assistance is needed. As you saw in yesterday's email (the long one) the banned user Skyring launched a sockpuppet siege on my talkpage, using over 30 identities to add in demands over and over again. (Thanks to all those who reverted him, over and over again.)
He is now trying a new approach - putting what he calls an 'open letter to Jtdirl' on talk pages all over Wikipedia. For example
October 2005 20:47 Talk:Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) (diff; hist) . . 144.131.118.99 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:45 Talk:Tomás Cardinal O'Fiaich (diff; hist) . . 144.131.118.99 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:36 Talk:Ian Paisley (diff; hist) . . 203.51.35.227 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:35 Talk:George III of the United Kingdom (diff; hist) . . 139.168.158.199 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:34 Talk:Irish Republican Army (diff; hist) . . 144.131.119.3 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) m 20:34 Wikipedia talk:Village pump (diff; hist) . . Theresa knott (Talk | block) (Reverted edits by 203.51.35.148 to last version by Jtdirl)
Though banned for a year for stalking me Skyring is still trying to get me to talk to him. I am deliberately not responding or reverting. If you see any more of his messages anywhere on the 'pedia, please revert on sight.
Thanks folks, Thom.
Eventually Skyring might finally get the message that a ban means you are banned.
___________________________________________________________ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com
On 10/19/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
Hey folks,
Your assistance is needed. As you saw in yesterday's email (the long one) the banned user Skyring launched a sockpuppet siege on my talkpage, using over 30 identities to add in demands over and over again. (Thanks to all those who reverted him, over and over again.)
He is now trying a new approach - putting what he calls an 'open letter to Jtdirl' on talk pages all over Wikipedia. For example
October 2005 20:47 Talk:Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) (diff; hist) . . 144.131.118.99 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:45 Talk:Tomás Cardinal O'Fiaich (diff; hist) . . 144.131.118.99 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:36 Talk:Ian Paisley (diff; hist) . . 203.51.35.227 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:35 Talk:George III of the United Kingdom (diff; hist) . . 139.168.158.199 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) 20:34 Talk:Irish Republican Army (diff; hist) . . 144.131.119.3 (Talk | block) (Open letter to user:jtdirl) m 20:34 Wikipedia talk:Village pump (diff; hist) . . Theresa knott (Talk | block) (Reverted edits by 203.51.35.148 to last version by Jtdirl)
Though banned for a year for stalking me Skyring is still trying to get me to talk to him. I am deliberately not responding or reverting. If you see any more of his messages anywhere on the 'pedia, please revert on sight.
Thanks folks, Thom.
Eventually Skyring might finally get the message that a ban means you are banned.
this link my of use to those who want to track this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ARecentchanges&hideli...
-- geni
From: Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously
wrong, it
is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through,
sure
its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much
for
an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.
Show me some old vandalism.
Are you suggesting it doesn't exist? I've come across week-old vandalism on little-watched articles on my watchlist.
Jay.
On 10/20/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com
Show me some old vandalism.
Are you suggesting it doesn't exist? I've come across week-old vandalism on little-watched articles on my watchlist.
I'm suggesting that it's not around in significant amounts. I find some now and again. I find instances of poor quality writing and bad organization more often. A few articles are prone to link-spamming, others get POV-pushing. Compared to that, old vandalism is rather rare.
From: "Tony Sidaway"
I'm suggesting that it's not around in significant amounts. I find some now and again. I find instances of poor quality writing and bad organization more often. A few articles are prone to link-spamming, others get POV-pushing. Compared to that, old vandalism is rather rare.
The kind of old vandalims that I find particularly disturbing is stuff like this http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Bunsen&diff=23686756&am... which occurred on september 21, then was edited in by 2 more editors, until I reverted it on October 5th. The reason I find it particularly disturbing is that the anon only ever made that single destructive edit, which was not only not noticed but actually totally ignored by the next 2 editors, and I only noticed it because I thought it was odd we had such a crap article on an important person. If he had been less important I imagine no one would ever have noticed.
It is stuff like this that really makes me think there must be a better way than having a policy of "Anyone can edit".
Martin
On 20/10/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
From: "Tony Sidaway"
I'm suggesting that it's not around in significant amounts. I find some now and again. I find instances of poor quality writing and bad organization more often. A few articles are prone to link-spamming, others get POV-pushing. Compared to that, old vandalism is rather rare.
The kind of old vandalims that I find particularly disturbing is stuff like this ...
The worst I ever noticed was someone removing the entire "Political History" section from [[George H. W. Bush]], which meant we had nothing covering him between 1964 and 1988. This was removed on 26th November 2004, and I only discovered it on _15th January 2005_.
You have to wonder how no-one noticed it missing in the intervening months...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 10/20/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
You have to wonder how no-one noticed it missing in the intervening months...
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Because no one ever really reads that article.
-- geni
Fighting vandalism does take away a lot of time from good editors that could be much better spent elsewhere. A couple of months ago I looked at [[Adolf Hitler]] and spotted an embarassing mistake in it. I started wondering how it could stay in for months when there are truly knowledgable editors watching it all the time.
It is one of the pages being subjected to constant vandalism, which makes it nearly impossible to track the good faith edits, since they are mixed up with the bad stuff. There is simply too much noise in the page history.
You need to check out the diffs all the time and you can't always simply revert, because sometimes good faith edits are mixed up with bad faith edits. I think it takes a lot of time just to keep the article from deteriorating into a mess, let alone improving it.
I think fighting vandalism this way is a truly stupid waste of time.
Something needs to change.
nyenyec
On 10/20/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
From: "Tony Sidaway"
I'm suggesting that it's not around in significant amounts. I find some now and again. I find instances of poor quality writing and bad organization more often. A few articles are prone to link-spamming, others get POV-pushing. Compared to that, old vandalism is rather rare.
Unfortunately it is more common than we realise. From nonsensical 'factoids' that are made up to completely ridiculous articles. I came across one page recently on a prominent early 20th century politician. It was twelve lines of paranoid, POV garbage. It had been sitting there for months. If anyone thinking about joining Wikipedia had stumbled across the article as their first experience of the site I wouldn't have blamed them for saying "if this is what this so-called encyclopædia publishes, it is obviously a heap of crap" and left Wikipedia. Even when I rewrote it the vandal kept coming back to reinsert his garbage. When I left for a few weeks he came back again, put back the rubbish and it survived unnoticed until I came back and saw it on my watchlist.
A solution might be to create alongside recent changes and a watchlist a topiclist, whereby if people are interested in, and knowledgeable about, a topic, all edits on that topic would show up. That way they could keep an eye on articles that they have not edited (or even knew existed) but which they know about and so could spot vandalism or garbage edits. In my case I would then easily spot dodgy edits on Irish history, politics, constitutional law, etc. Others could do sport, of television, or whatever. It might help catch dodgy edits in obscure article quickly.
--- Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/20/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com
Show me some old vandalism.
Are you suggesting it doesn't exist? I've come
across week-old vandalism on
little-watched articles on my watchlist.
I'm suggesting that it's not around in significant amounts. I find some now and again. I find instances of poor quality writing and bad organization more often. A few articles are prone to link-spamming, others get POV-pushing. Compared to that, old vandalism is rather rare. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Tom Cadden wrote:
Unfortunately it is more common than we realise. From nonsensical 'factoids' that are made up to completely ridiculous articles. I came across one page recently on a prominent early 20th century politician. It was twelve lines of paranoid, POV garbage. It had been sitting there for months. If anyone thinking about joining Wikipedia had stumbled across the article as their first experience of the site I wouldn't have blamed them for saying "if this is what this so-called encyclop�dia publishes, it is obviously a heap of crap" and left Wikipedia. Even when I rewrote it the vandal kept coming back to reinsert his garbage. When I left for a few weeks he came back again, put back the rubbish and it survived unnoticed until I came back and saw it on my watchlist.
First, what you're encountering is not vandalism: it's someone pushing her/his POV. All of us do that on Wikipedia, whether what we write is paranoid garbage or not; whether we are successful should depend on how we agree to disagree on the subject -- although it sometimes doesn't.
Second, take a look at Wikipedia's steps for conflict resolution: your situation is why these steps have been created. Start at the far end of complaining to the ArbCom, & I'm sure one of these steps will solve the case. (A fair number of these kinds of agreements come to a resolution just by simply asking another person to join in the conversation.)
Geoff
G'day Tony,
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously wrong, it is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through, sure its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much for an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.
Show me some old vandalism.
I've rvted vandalism that's been weeks old in the past (sorry, no examples come to mind). But that's on really obscure articles that I've only come across because of Random Page patrolling or similar.
The longest I can think of with a specific example on a well-maintained (ish) page is [[Victorian Gold Rush]], which included an embarrassingly prominent test ("hello mr sheep") that wasn't noticed, despite others editing the article, for four hours.
On 10/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously
wrong, it
is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through,
sure
its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much
for
an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.
Show me some old vandalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wave_model&diff=3162880&ol... 12 April 2004
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wave_model&diff=5317009&ol... 20 August 2004
If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously wrong, it is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through, sure its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much for an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.
It's a lot easier to revert vandalism when it's being performed by a logged in user. This is especially true if you force some non-vandals to start logging in.
Yeah, the party line is that we want to allow people to contribute anonymously, but the fact is that the current system doesn't really allow that anyway. The real problem with requiring *everyone* to log in is that it makes it more time consuming to casually edit. However, the alternative in this particular case is to make it impossible to edit using that IP, so I don't see that as an argument.
The question becomes whether or not this will make it easier for vandals. I don't think it'll matter that much, especially if there is a mechanism to hard block certain IP addresses in case a Wik-like vandal comes along. (Preferably without the blocking admin needing to see the IP address at all, but that's another argument altogether).
Regards
Martin
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 10/19/05, Martin Richards Martin@velocitymanager.com wrote:
This is a project to make the best encyclopedia ever, policy and procedure should evolve as our problems evolve, and vandalim is one of the biggest problems
You might think so, but it isn't. Even the most vandalized articles on Wikipedia are well under control. The category "Protected against vandalism", which contains a list of all pages currently with a vprotect template, is almost empty of real articles.
It's easy to get the Chicken Licken attitude if you don't look at the actual facts.
Vandalism is in no way, shape or form a serious ongoing threat to Wikipedia.
I think you're discounting the amount of time that can be be sucked up by patrolling. For instance, my longish watchlist has very few of the "popular" articles on it, but still gives me some 500 edits to review each day. Of those, most are by editors I know and trust, so I don't look at those unless the summary line is interesting, but that leaves maybe 100 by anons. Of those, maybe 5 of the anon edits are the obvious "Joey is gay"-type vandalism, but since there is no way to tell which ones they are without bringing up a diff, I need to look at all of those edits. That can easily suck up an hour - very often at least one of the vandalisms is "complex" in that it involves multiple edits, and maybe a ham-handed incomplete attempt to fix, thus requiring careful study of the history to make sure all is scrubbed.
Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), etc. This leaves a handful of valuable edits, but the average total is less than I could have added in the same hour just working from the books in my personal library. Nevertheless, I do the patrolling because it seems that many of the pages I'm watching have no other reviewers - more than a few times I've overlooked an anon's trash and it went unnoticed for days or weeks.
So yes, we're keeping the random vandalism under control, but IMHO just barely, and at the price of time that should be going into development of better content. I think we really need to consider whether unlimited anon editing is helping or hurting our primary goal of encyclopedia writing.
Stan
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Stan Shebs wrote about anonymous editing:
very often at least one of the vandalisms is "complex" in that it involves multiple edits, and maybe a ham-handed incomplete attempt to fix, thus requiring careful study of the history to make sure all is scrubbed.
The best solution in cases where an anon or a newbie has tried to revert is to do it yourself, manually. If Mediawiki finds that there is no change, it silently ignores the revert.
Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), etc. This leaves a handful of valuable edits, but the average total is less than I could have added in the same hour just working from the books in my personal library. Nevertheless, I do the patrolling because it seems that many of the pages I'm watching have no other reviewers - more than a few times I've overlooked an anon's trash and it went unnoticed for days or weeks.
You should be on the welcoming committee! Wherever possible I leave messages for anons who have "done good" (or at least, not done bad - and I leave messages for them as well). It lets them know that their work is appreciated, and more importantly, lets them know how things work around the place.
So yes, we're keeping the random vandalism under control, but IMHO just barely, and at the price of time that should be going into development of better content. I think we really need to consider whether unlimited anon editing is helping or hurting our primary goal of encyclopedia writing.
It's entirely possible that we are reaching the point of discovering that Wikipedia doesn't scale. We already know that certain parts of it don't. Maybe it's time to "set aside" (permanantly protect) some of our best articles for version 1.0 and let people work on the rest.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
I think you're discounting the amount of time that can be be sucked up by patrolling. For instance, my longish watchlist has very few of the "popular" articles on it, but still gives me some 500 edits to review each day. Of those, most are by editors I know and trust, so I don't look at those unless the summary line is interesting, but that leaves maybe 100 by anons. Of those, maybe 5 of the anon edits are the obvious "Joey is gay"-type vandalism, but since there is no way to tell which ones they are without bringing up a diff, I need to look at all of those edits. That can easily suck up an hour - very often at least one of the vandalisms is "complex" in that it involves multiple edits, and maybe a ham-handed incomplete attempt to fix, thus requiring careful study of the history to make sure all is scrubbed.
I think the solution to this is to come up with ways to streamline this process. What if watchlists could only show anon edits (or better yet, include anon edits, edits by certain users you designate, and edits by users with fewer than X edits)? What if there were ways for groups of users to share a watchlist and check off items as they complete them (this could be done for any ad-hoc group of users)? What if we could attach references directly to pieces of text, or maybe even better, to individual edits? What if we created a project to systematically go through all the edits made by IP addresses? What if we added to that a project to go through all the edits made by users who contributed fewer than say 10 edits? Time is being wasted because vandalism hunting is way too ad-hoc.
Blocking is an inherently flawed solution to vandalism unless you suggest that we lock down the wiki to essentially just the admins. Good idea or not, that's not going to happen, the history of Wikipedia has brought together too many people who would vigourously oppose it, so if you want a locked down "wiki" I suggest you start a fork.
Sometimes blocking is an adequete temporary solution for the times when a longer term fix is still in the works. But as Wikipedia grows and vandals become more sophisticated, blocking is unlikely to be a good solution.
I think we actually block far too much already, especially with user blocks. I'd suggest that most blocks actually tend to make it harder to find and revert vandalism.
Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random
rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), etc. This leaves a handful of valuable edits, but the average total is less than I could have added in the same hour just working from the books in my personal library. Nevertheless, I do the patrolling because it seems that many of the pages I'm watching have no other reviewers - more than a few times I've overlooked an anon's trash and it went unnoticed for days or weeks.
I think a study of anon edits would show that the vast majority of them are trivial, and the remaining ones are by people who would have created an account anyway. What can't be as easily measured, and what I suspect is the case, is that there are a lot of users who initially edited the wiki anonymously and later got hooked and created an account.
So yes, we're keeping the random vandalism under control, but IMHO
just barely, and at the price of time that should be going into development of better content. I think we really need to consider whether unlimited anon editing is helping or hurting our primary goal of encyclopedia writing.
Stan
From: Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org
I think we actually block far too much already, especially with user blocks. I'd suggest that most blocks actually tend to make it harder to find and revert vandalism.
Huh? How?
Jay.
On 10/20/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org
I think we actually block far too much already, especially with user blocks. I'd suggest that most blocks actually tend to make it harder to find and revert vandalism.
Huh? How?
Because the blocked user can no longer edit under the same username and/or IP address. It's much harder to find vandalism when you don't know what accounts to look under. Just look at what happened when Wik was blocked. It made it harder to find and revert his/her bad edits, not easier.
Jay.
Anthony
On 10/21/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
Because the blocked user can no longer edit under the same username and/or IP address. It's much harder to find vandalism when you don't know what accounts to look under. Just look at what happened when Wik was blocked. It made it harder to find and revert his/her bad edits, not easier.
Anthony
However the vast majority on anoying teens stop when blocked (most stop when warned).
-- geni
On 10/20/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/21/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
Because the blocked user can no longer edit under the same username
and/or
IP address. It's much harder to find vandalism when you don't know what accounts to look under. Just look at what happened when Wik was blocked.
It
made it harder to find and revert his/her bad edits, not easier.
Anthony
However the vast majority on anoying teens stop when blocked (most stop when warned).
-- geni
I'm not sure it's the vast majority, but yeah, there are certainly some who will stop after they get blocked.
On 10/21/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
I'm not sure it's the vast majority, but yeah, there are certainly some who will stop after they get blocked.
Most don't know how to use proxies so they don't much choice.
-- geni
On 10/20/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/21/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
I'm not sure it's the vast majority, but yeah, there are certainly some
who
will stop after they get blocked.
Most don't know how to use proxies so they don't much choice.
-- geni
Most people know how to log off and log back on, though.
On 10/21/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
Most people know how to log off and log back on, though.
Fortunetly not everyone is on a dynamic ip
-- geni
On 10/21/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/21/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
Most people know how to log off and log back on, though.
Fortunetly not everyone is on a dynamic ip
-- geni
Somewhere between "someone" and "the vast majority" is about what I'd estimate.
On 10/19/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), etc.
By the way, I don't think you should discount the usefulness of "trivial" edits. Yes, any individual edit is trivial, but in aggregate they are significant. Also consider this: even in a perfect situation, where all those anonymous fixes were submitted to a talk page or somewhere else for a regular editor to fix, it'd still take editor time to make the change being suggested by the anon. In fact, it'd take more editor time to do this than to simply glance at a diff.
Yes, maybe some of those "anons" would log in instead, but having a bunch of new users to check is harder than checking anons, at least with anons you can easily distinguish them from regular users - their name is a number.
It'd be nice if we could get the regular anons to log in, but still let the casual anons edit anonymously, but I'm not really sure how to do this.
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Anthony DiPierro wrote:
It'd be nice if we could get the regular anons to log in, but still let the casual anons edit anonymously, but I'm not really sure how to do this.
A username is more anonymous than an IP, and provides a greater sense of identity. It's impossible to tell which of an IP's edits are good and bad, because good and bad users could be using it.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
On 10/20/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Anthony DiPierro wrote:
It'd be nice if we could get the regular anons to log in, but still let
the
casual anons edit anonymously, but I'm not really sure how to do this.
A username is more anonymous than an IP, and provides a greater sense of identity. It's impossible to tell which of an IP's edits are good and bad, because good and bad users could be using it.
"A username is more anonymous than an IP, and [a username] provides a greater sense of identity"? I must not be understanding what you mean, because that statement seems to contradict itself. "It's impossible to tell which of an IPs edits are good and bad, because good and bad users could be using it." True, but if a user only makes one or two edits it really doesn't matter anyway. That's what I mean by "casual anons", the kind of people who would only create an account, make a couple edits, and then forget they created an account in the first place. For those people, who probably make up the majority of anon edits, logging in is meaningless and makes it harder to sort out the good from the bad. And of course, it's impossible to tell which of a username's edits are good and bad. In order to trust that an editor is a "good" editor, they have to make more than just a few edits. If we could convince those good editors to create accounts, that would be useful, but for the casual editors it'd probably be easier if we just threw them all under a single account, and kept the IP addresses only for the purposes of implementing blocks.
- --
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On 20/10/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
A username is more anonymous than an IP, and provides a greater sense of identity. It's impossible to tell which of an IP's edits are good and bad, because good and bad users could be using it.
"A username is more anonymous than an IP, and [a username] provides a greater sense of identity"? I must not be understanding what you mean, because that statement seems to contradict itself.
If you edit as an IP which resolves to 452c.student-resnet.chicago.edu, I can tell a surprising amount about you. If you edit as [[User:Chicago_guy]], I can't.
But it's a lot *easier* for the community to attatch an identity to the one with a username, rather than the one with an IP. There's a couple of IPs that I know are good, reliable editors, people I have no reason to distrust, yet I keep checking their edits on my watchlist simply because I can't ever remember that 123.123.123.123 (or whatever) is the person who keeps working on the date pages. If they were editing under a name, after a week or so I'd easily remember the name, I'd know not to chase them around when I had no reason to...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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Andrew Gray wrote:
On 20/10/05, Anthony DiPierro wikispam@inbox.org wrote:
A username is more anonymous than an IP, and provides a greater sense of identity. It's impossible to tell which of an IP's edits are good and bad, because good and bad users could be using it.
"A username is more anonymous than an IP, and [a username] provides a greater sense of identity"? I must not be understanding what you mean, because that statement seems to contradict itself.
If you edit as an IP which resolves to 452c.student-resnet.chicago.edu, I can tell a surprising amount about you. If you edit as [[User:Chicago_guy]], I can't.
But it's a lot *easier* for the community to attatch an identity to the one with a username, rather than the one with an IP. There's a couple of IPs that I know are good, reliable editors, people I have no reason to distrust, yet I keep checking their edits on my watchlist simply because I can't ever remember that 123.123.123.123 (or whatever) is the person who keeps working on the date pages. If they were editing under a name, after a week or so I'd easily remember the name, I'd know not to chase them around when I had no reason to...
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Hmm. I posted that way too late at night.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \