Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)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
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