Hi all, Just removed another tripling elephant population reference at [[Queenie (elephant)]], which had apparently been there for 2 weeks. I wonder how many more of these there are.
Even more alarmingly, http://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=elephant%... shows quite a few of these joke references have made their way into Google's cache.
Ok, the current example is trivial, but maybe we need some sort of organised response to these kind of attacks, which will presumably become more common. What if an organised group starting planting "George Bush is dead" all over the place or something...
Steve
Surely we can have a bot spider pages or dumps for triplet elephant references?
On 8/29/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, Just removed another tripling elephant population reference at [[Queenie (elephant)]], which had apparently been there for 2 weeks. I wonder how many more of these there are.
Even more alarmingly,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=elephant%... shows quite a few of these joke references have made their way into Google's cache.
Ok, the current example is trivial, but maybe we need some sort of organised response to these kind of attacks, which will presumably become more common. What if an organised group starting planting "George Bush is dead" all over the place or something...
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 8/29/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Ok, the current example is trivial, but maybe we need some sort of organised response to these kind of attacks, which will presumably become more common. What if an organised group starting planting "George Bush is dead" all over the place or something...
Steve
Then we'll revert, block the users and if they still keep coming, semi-protect the article until the shitstorm is over. Hasn't this been the way we've always dealt with vandals? (well, semi-protection is new, but you get my point)
The thing to remember with these attacks is that they are very short-lived. They're tenacious, but after a while they will get tired of it. In a month, who will even remember the Colbert thing? This sort of vandalism has never really been wikipedias problem, much more dangerous is the subtle, change-a-date-to-be-a-few-days-off-style vandalism. And we're cracking down on that too with the whole verifiability and sourcing thing.
--Oskar
Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Just removed another tripling elephant population reference at [[Queenie (elephant)]], which had apparently been there for 2 weeks. I wonder how many more of these there are.
Even more alarmingly, http://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=elephant%... shows quite a few of these joke references have made their way into Google's cache.
Ok, the current example is trivial, but maybe we need some sort of organised response to these kind of attacks, which will presumably become more common. What if an organised group starting planting "George Bush is dead" all over the place or something...
Yes, or a ferry sank in lake Michigan and 50 died. I'm glad you're looking into this. The same basic issue has come up in a variety of ways recently. Part of it is simply numbers. Unless you have enough people to watch over all the possible changes and undo them, there is no, hmmmm, process to respond to such attacks. Consider yourself lucky that this wasn't a PR firm that quietly hired 50 temps to sit down and make blind edits to thousands of article sections over a few days.
While looking over this myself, I found a sourced article referring to a specific wildlife area where the elephant population had tripled, so having an automated search & replace isn't the answer. OTOH, if the software can be told to watch for identical changes in many different articles over a short period, it's possible to at least set-up an alarm so, preferably, all editors can be notified and check that the change at least meet policy and are verifiable. All editors because I doubt 10 admins want or even can deal with a truly dedicated attack.
~~Pro-Lick http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick http://www.wikiality.net/index.php?title=User:Pro-Lick
--spam may follow-- --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.
On 8/29/06, Cheney Shill halliburton_shill@yahoo.com wrote:
While looking over this myself, I found a sourced article referring to a specific wildlife area where the elephant population had tripled, so having an automated search & replace isn't the answer. OTOH, if the software can be told to watch for
Yeah I found that too - Kruger Park (and I was very skeptical about the reference at first - can you believe it, too many elephants, culling needed!) Definitely not search & replace, but an automated search & flag would be useful.
The bigger worry is when we can't search and replace because the nature of the change is too vague. "Everyone go and change some random dead person to having married just before their death".
I do note, however, that there have been several uncoordinated responses. Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Centrx/Colbert (probably the most authoratitive?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Harmil http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AElephant&diff=67362078&... (call to arms) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_Tripling_Elephant...
A simple centralized "mass vandalism" page would be a great place to handle these attacks. People could list all the instances they find, categorised as Centrx did, into high and low frequencies, facilitating the task of monitoring them.
Steve
Oh, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dealing_with_coordinated_vandalism is also a start.
Steve
On 8/29/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/29/06, Cheney Shill halliburton_shill@yahoo.com wrote:
While looking over this myself, I found a sourced article referring to a specific wildlife area where the elephant population had tripled, so having an automated search & replace isn't the answer. OTOH, if the software can be told to watch for
Yeah I found that too - Kruger Park (and I was very skeptical about the reference at first - can you believe it, too many elephants, culling needed!) Definitely not search & replace, but an automated search & flag would be useful.
The bigger worry is when we can't search and replace because the nature of the change is too vague. "Everyone go and change some random dead person to having married just before their death".
I do note, however, that there have been several uncoordinated responses. Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Centrx/Colbert (probably the most authoratitive?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Harmil http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AElephant&diff=67362078&... (call to arms) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_Tripling_Elephant...
A simple centralized "mass vandalism" page would be a great place to handle these attacks. People could list all the instances they find, categorised as Centrx did, into high and low frequencies, facilitating the task of monitoring them.
Steve