All,
An anonymous user (IP 146.6.110.149, which tracks back to UT Austin) claiming to be Gary LaVergne, a UT employee and author of a book on Charles Whitman entitled "Sniper in the Tower" (http://www.garylavergne.com/book.htm), has posted a message on my talk page complaining about some content I about him, presumably at [[Charles Whitman]].
Here is the text of his message:
Mr. Sigenthaler's recent experience has encouraged me to send you this note. As you know, I have been the subject of some discussion in one of the pages you administer. Some of those comments I consider libelous. I strongly suggest that you, as the party responsible for this article and discussion, and/or Wiki executives take immediate action to purge such false and irresponsible statements, and block such from occurring in the future.
Please forward this to Wiki executives.
I look forward to your speedy response.
Gary M. Lavergne
I'm a relative newcomer to the Charles Whitman page, having been asked to review some rather disruptive behavior and inappropriate editing by [[User:Subwayjack]], who I blocked until this evening for 3RR, vandalism and disruption. I can only guess, but I assume that this person is referring to Subwayjack's rather convoluted assertion that Lavergne's book was biased and that he published it in collusion with the University of Texas somehow to support their position on Whitman (it was published by UT Press).
The article doesn't contain this speculative information currently, although at one time Subwayjack did insert it and it was summarily deleted (Inserting edit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Whitman&diff=30745179&...). It does remain on the talk page, and I suppose in the article's page history. What's the general feeling about how to proceed? I don't think a person's comments on the talk page can be considered libellous, but maybe it's advisable to delete that edit from the article itself's revision history.
K.
The article doesn't contain this speculative information currently,although at one time Subwayjack did insert it and it was summarily deleted (Inserting edit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Whitman&diff=30745179&...). It does remain on the talk page, and I suppose in the article's page history. What's the general feeling about how to proceed? I don't think a person's comments on the talk page can be considered libellous, but maybe it's advisable to delete that edit from the article itself's revision history.
K.
Kate - my feeling would be to remove the information from the talk page. There seem to be a lot of complaints about material on talk pages because search engines can find them. If it looks really bad, the edit history might be worth removing too, but as long as it's on the talk page it's likely to remain an issue.
Ian (Guettarda)
--- Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Kate - my feeling would be to remove the information from the talk page. There seem to be a lot of complaints about material on talk pages because search engines can find them. If it looks really bad, the edit history might be worth removing too, but as long as it's on the talk page it's likely to remain an issue.
What? Have you forgotten WINASCO... 'Wikipedia Is Not a Self-Censoring Organization.' The notion that the threat of libel claims requires us to be proactive in removing material is entirely based on a misconception of what Wikipedia is, how it works, what its value is, and what the stakes are.
WP is a living, breathing, global information dispensation entity --one which is open enough that any claimed repsonsibility or accountability for its content must fall to everyone to correct; including those who may be implicated by material in it.
Noone complains if an article on some video game character be less than encyclopedic. And nor should they; quality gravitates can be found in more important articles, and conversely, less quality may be indicative of a substantial lacking in importance.
By inadvertently giving Siegenthaler a wide berth, WP may have gained a friend who can speak for old generations of people may not quite grasp the concept. Conversely this may have also left ourselves open to solicitations from various forms of legalistic hackery from people, or people's secretaries, their lawyers, etc. There are no shortage of lessons to come of this, and perhaps thats the point. IAC, this notion that we have to delete comments on talk pages (against etiquette no doubt) is overreactive and misguided. IMHO.
Stevertigo
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On 12/12/05, Katefan0 katefan0@yahoo.com wrote:
All,
An anonymous user (IP 146.6.110.149, which tracks back to UT Austin) claiming to be Gary LaVergne, a UT employee and author of a book on Charles Whitman entitled "Sniper in the Tower" (http://www.garylavergne.com/book.htm), has posted a message on my talk page complaining about some content I about him, presumably at [[Charles Whitman]]. Here is the text of his message:Mr. Sigenthaler's recent experience has encouraged me to send you this note. As you know, I have been the subject of some discussion in one of the pages you administer. Some of those comments I consider libelous. I strongly suggest that you, as the party responsible for this article and discussion, and/or Wiki executives take immediate action to purge such false and irresponsible statements, and block such from occurring in the future.
Please forward this to Wiki executives.
I look forward to your speedy response.
Gary M. Lavergne
I'm a relative newcomer to the Charles Whitman page, having been asked to review some rather disruptive behavior and inappropriate editing by [[User:Subwayjack]], who I blocked until this evening for 3RR, vandalism and disruption. I can only guess, but I assume that this person is referring to Subwayjack's rather convoluted assertion that Lavergne's book was biased and that he published it in collusion with the University of Texas somehow to support their position on Whitman (it was published by UT Press). The article doesn't contain this speculative information currently, although at one time Subwayjack did insert it and it was summarily deleted (Inserting edit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Whitman&diff=30745179&oldid=30739441). It does remain on the talk page, and I suppose in the article's page history. What's the general feeling about how to proceed? I don't think a person's comments on the talk page can be considered libellous, but maybe it's advisable to delete that edit from the article itself's revision history.K.
Forward it to Jimbo. He's the one who opened up the can of worms by deleting the Seigenthaler references from the history (wasn't he?). Let him deal with this one too.
Anthony
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
-Matt
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
--Jimbo
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so. --Jimbo
looks like we are back to looking at the old revert and delete idea. It would need codeing though.
-- geni
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
The problem is that what people normally request removed in this fashion does not fall under the category of simple vandalism.
I am not against the idea of removing simple vandalism completely from the history in principle, although I am worried about its potential for abuse.
Right now, we do not have the automated tools to make doing this practicable except in specific cases.
-Matt
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
--Jimbo
I agree with the sentiment, but I haven't heard a proposal which would make it practical. By practical I mean, among other things, that it wouldn't be abused and that it would be easy to dispel accusations of abuse. I believe that if this were made easy it would inevitably lead to admins deleting some cases of criticism of Wikipedia, for instance. Limiting the use to high profile cases, when an agent of the foundation steps in, is much safer.
Anthony
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Jimmy Wales wrote:
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing
vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
I suspect that scouring the edit history of vandalism might be more trouble than it's worth. Consider that it's sometimes difficult to tell if an edit is vandalism or not. Before you know it, you'll have an "Edits for deletion" voting system in place, because everyone wants to have a vote in making sure that only real vandalism gets deleted. Otherwise, it will be entirely up to the deleting admin, who is likely to make mistakes.
On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to view the edit history of [[George W. Bush]] and actually know who has been editing the article and not vandalising. Here's an idea: How about instead of deleting vandalism outright, users (or admins) can mark an edit as "vandalism/vandal revert" and there would be an option (on by default?) not to view these marked edits on the edit history? (A possible function of admin rollback would be that it would mark all rolled-back edits as vandalism.) That way we could preserve all edits for posterity but people could still get work done. You could even keep track on a user-by-user or ip-by-ip basis how many edits had been marked as vandalism.
Of course, blatantly libelous edits that contain personal information (phone numbers, addresses) should be deleted. But I think this would be better than trying to clean up the bulk of all vandalism.
Ryan
Jimmy Wales wrote:
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
But it's not all junk. The Seigenthaler vandalism wasn't noticed for four months because it wasn't a popular page, what if instead of the addition of a falsehood it had been the deletion of truths? That deleted material would have eventually vanished from history under a system like this and the vandalism would become uncorrectable.
It seems to me this sort of functionality would move the debates we've been having over deletion of articles down to the level of the deletion of individual sentences.
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote: <snip>
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
--Jimbo
The by far greatest argument I see against deleting such things from page history is that by doing that you are infact deleting evidence of bad user conduct. We need to see all that a user have done to be able to judge them fairly, not only in RfCs and RfArs but also in such things as Requests For Adminship and the like.
What if a user has been notorious in vandalising an article for a short time, but only very, very few users have been aware of it (say, a low profile page), and one month later an RfA comes up and some one says "No way, this guy vandalised article X severl times a month ago". The other users need to see proof of that from the history, and be able to judge the users themselves!! Are we supposed to take these other guys words for it that he is a vandal? No, we need to see the evidence.
We also need to be able to judge the rollbacking admins actions, how will we know if a rollback was warrented if the history is incomplete.
Then there are ofcourse arbcom hearings and RfCs, that's obvious too.
Delete only when absolutly necessary, keep EVERYTHING else in the history. A complete history of everything that's happend is fundamental to make wikipedia work.
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
I made the same recommendation a few days ago and was told (admittedly not by a developer) that "it would be too difficult to implement". Bah.
Kelly
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Kelly Martin wrote:
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
I made the same recommendation a few days ago and was told (admittedly not by a developer) that "it would be too difficult to implement". Bah.
Too difficult in the sense of "not worth it". I'm not just talking about coding here though, since I'm not a coder and have no idea how much effort it would cost the devs. I mean it may be too difficult and too costly to implement administratively; see my other email in reply to Jimbo. What I _don't_ want to see is an atmosphere where admins are seen as obligated to scour the page histories to delete all vandal edits. That would slow down RC patrol enormously, which is a job that is tedious and rewardless enough as it is.
Still, I could be wrong, and I don't want to be that guy who is opposed to all change, so maybe we should experiment with the idea on a limited basis.
Ryan
Ryan Delaney wrote:
Too difficult in the sense of "not worth it". I'm not just talking about coding here though, since I'm not a coder and have no idea how much effort it would cost the devs. I mean it may be too difficult and too costly to implement administratively; see my other email in reply to Jimbo. What I _don't_ want to see is an atmosphere where admins are seen as obligated to scour the page histories to delete all vandal edits. That would slow down RC patrol enormously, which is a job that is tedious and rewardless enough as it is.
I think a lot of the issues being raised are solvable and amount to interface design issues. Certainly we don't want an atmosphere where admins are seen as obligated to scour page histories. But it might be nice if admins could simply 'nuke' individual revisions (and 'unnuke' them, of course).
There are lots of things that we allow admins to do, which other admins can undo (like block vandals). This can just be another tool in our arsenal: the ability for admins to "hide" (we should call it that rather than "delete") certain edits from casual users.
The issue of whether this would allow vandals to make it through an admin election is an interesting one of course. It seems unlikely to me, and if it ever did happen that a vandal was elected admin, we could adjust process. (Calvinball, remember.)
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One of the features I'm thinking of coding in for my wiki (running on mediawiki 1.5) is the ability to tag contributions as "suspect" and have them viewable only by specific kinds of users. This is because the wiki will be used for education and we don't want kids to see not-nice content, but we do want teachersto see it and be able to take action if their students are being disruptive.
That's still on the wish list, though. :-) I'm planning on trying to implement it this spring. If anyone wants to help... ;-)
Andrea
On 12/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
Too difficult in the sense of "not worth it". I'm not just talking about coding here though, since I'm not a coder and have no idea how much effort it would cost the devs. I mean it may be too difficult and too costly to implement administratively; see my other email in reply to Jimbo. What I _don't_ want to see is an atmosphere where admins are seen as obligated to scour the page histories to delete all vandal edits. That would slow down RC patrol enormously, which is a job that is tedious and rewardless enough as it is.
I think a lot of the issues being raised are solvable and amount to interface design issues. Certainly we don't want an atmosphere where admins are seen as obligated to scour page histories. But it might be nice if admins could simply 'nuke' individual revisions (and 'unnuke' them, of course).
There are lots of things that we allow admins to do, which other admins can undo (like block vandals). This can just be another tool in our arsenal: the ability for admins to "hide" (we should call it that rather than "delete") certain edits from casual users.
The issue of whether this would allow vandals to make it through an admin election is an interesting one of course. It seems unlikely to me, and if it ever did happen that a vandal was elected admin, we could adjust process. (Calvinball, remember.)
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--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea:
A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete versions that are older than a week and would need to. This would clean-up page histories a great deal and get rid of most of the libel and slander in them. Then, as needed, a human admin can delete more versions since a great many reverts are not done by admins. A more sophisticated admin bot could compare diffs to detect reverts (using the comments 'Reverted to last version by..' and 'rv' only to identify diffs to check).
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
I agree.
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On 12/13/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete versions that are older than a week and would need to. This would clean-up page histories a great deal and get rid of most of the libel and slander in them. Then, as needed, a human admin can delete more versions since a great many reverts are not done by admins. A more sophisticated admin bot could compare diffs to detect reverts (using the comments 'Reverted to last version by..' and 'rv' only to identify diffs to check).
An issue arises when admins use the rollback feature for reversions that aren't vandalism. I know they're not supposed to, and I make a point never to, but it nonetheless does happen. Any ideas how to prevent this?
-- Sam
On 12/13/05, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
An issue arises when admins use the rollback feature for reversions that aren't vandalism. I know they're not supposed to, and I make a point never to, but it nonetheless does happen. Any ideas how to prevent this?
Heavy use of cluesticks and a reminder that because adminship is no big deal, it can be taken away without a lot of fuss.
Kelly
Daniel Mayer wrote:
I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea: A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete
Bad idea. There are way too many admins who use rollback on stuff they don't like - see the list of diffs I posted from WP:DRV recently. No way was that rollback of "vandalism".
- d.
On 12/14/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Bad idea. There are way too many admins who use rollback on stuff they don't like - see the list of diffs I posted from WP:DRV recently. No way was that rollback of "vandalism".
There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
Kelly
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Bad idea. There are way too many admins who use rollback on stuff they don't like - see the list of diffs I posted from WP:DRV recently. No way was that rollback of "vandalism".
There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
Kelly
It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.
-- geni
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.
Just what do you mean by that? There's no reason why we need to continue to grant admin privileges to people who abuse them.
Kelly
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.
Just what do you mean by that? There's no reason why we need to continue to grant admin privileges to people who abuse them.
Kelly
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
-- geni
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
It is better to have too few good admins than too many bad admins.
Kelly
On 12/15/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
It is better to have too few good admins than too many bad admins.
Kelly
Define bad.
-- geni
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Define bad.
Not good.
In this context, a "bad admin" is an admin who does not respect the spirit of policy, who bites newbies, who fuels edit wars instead of resolving them, or who otherwise does not uphold the obligations of an administrator in using administrative privileges. In short, someone who uses administrative privileges for a reason other than to improve the encyclopedia.
Kelly
On 12/15/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Define bad.
Not good.
In this context, a "bad admin" is an admin who does not respect the spirit of policy, who bites newbies, who fuels edit wars instead of resolving them,
Admins have no conflict resolution role.
or who otherwise does not uphold the obligations of an administrator in using administrative privileges. In short, someone who uses administrative privileges for a reason other than to improve the encyclopedia.
Kelly
Ah and thats where it gets tricky doesn't it. "Improve the encyclopedia" so subjective. The fact is removeing admins who have missused rollback would easly remove 1/3rd of the admins. It would also be likely to hit the most active admins. Under such a situation the only option would be to lock the database until we promoted some more.
There are a minium number of admins we need to continue fuctioning. And if we have to allow admins who you view as bad in order to reach that number there isn't much you can do about it.
-- geni
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
It is better to have too few good admins than too many bad admins.
Nope, it's worse.
G'day Cunctator,
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
It is better to have too few good admins than too many bad admins.
Nope, it's worse.
It depends how you define "bad". An admin who uses rollback instead of saying "rv - not an improvement" is probably doing less damage than an admin who edit wars, unblocks himself, wheel wars, or uses his privileges to advance his side in debates.
The situation is sufficiently desperate that I'd say we need the former, but I don't think we *ever* need the latter.
geni wrote:
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.
Just what do you mean by that? There's no reason why we need to continue to grant admin privileges to people who abuse them.
Kelly
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
You make it sound as though a perceived shortage of admins is reason enought to keep the rogues. Those rogues can drain as much time from the good admins as any group of common vandals.
Ec
geni wrote:
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/14/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
There are way too many admins who shouldn't be, then.
It isn't as if we have the luxery to say that.
Just what do you mean by that? There's no reason why we need to continue to grant admin privileges to people who abuse them.
Kelly
We don't have enough active admins. Roveing the ones we do have on any reasonable scale is not an option.
-- geni
No big deal, remember? Deopping should be as easy as opping, IMO. Anyway, I think a lot of admins (including myself) have misused rollback at one time or another, or just misclicked (due to impulse?). I support hitting people who misuse rollback on the head with a cluestick, but unless the admin refuses to heed the advice, I'm not sure deopping would be the right thing. (Though it's always up to the community.) This is also why I think removing rolled back edits from the page history is a *bad thing*. Just because it's no longer in the article doesn't make a particular edit bad. In addition, as others have noted, we'll lose history of vandalism and disputes. (Although it would be funny to see a user talk littered with {{test5}}s but nothing in [[Special:Contributions]].)
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
G'day John,
No big deal, remember? Deopping should be as easy as opping, IMO. Anyway, I think a lot of admins (including myself) have misused rollback at one time or another, or just misclicked (due to impulse?). I support hitting people who misuse rollback on the head with a cluestick, but unless the admin refuses to heed the advice, I'm not sure deopping would be the right thing. (Though it's always up to the community.) This is
If nothing else, if 'twere easier to deop then it would be easier to op, and perhaps adminship would return to "no big deal" status (an ancient creature that I'm assured has indeed existed in years gone past ... looking at old RfAs, it's probably right: "I'd like to be an admin, please" "sure thing" etc.).
As one who has misclicked rollback more than once, I sympathise with "I didn't mean to rv!". However, accidental rollbacks tend to be easy to recognise and fix by the offending admin, I think, so he should be doing that rather than making excuses.
also why I think removing rolled back edits from the page history is a *bad thing*. Just because it's no longer in the article doesn't make a particular edit bad. In addition, as others have noted, we'll lose history of vandalism and disputes. (Although it would be funny to see a user talk littered with {{test5}}s but nothing in [[Special:Contributions]].)
I have seen it (well, near enough): a user continually creating hoax articles or attack pages that were speedied gets a couple thousand warnings, is eventually indef blocked (or whatever), I check the contribs ... it's blank ...
On 12/13/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea:
A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be pointless clutter at that point). The bot would use the text 'Reverted to last version by..' along with checking the reverting person to make sure they are an admin. The bot would only delete versions that are older than a week and would need to. This would clean-up page histories a great deal and get rid of most of the libel and slander in them. Then, as needed, a human admin can delete more versions since a great many reverts are not done by admins. A more sophisticated admin bot could compare diffs to detect reverts (using the comments 'Reverted to last version by..' and 'rv' only to identify diffs to check).
Bad idea. I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread implementations of bad ideas. Most recent case: someone had modified the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in question.
-- [[User:Carnildo]]
--- Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
Bad idea. I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread implementations of bad ideas. Most recent case: someone had modified the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in question.
How is that a bad idea? The page history is for showing how an article developed. If a bit of text is no longer in the article due to a revert for any purpose, then the edit that added it and the edit that removed it need not be there forever. A week is long enough. In addition to removing vandalism, the above idea would also help to de-clutter page histories.
-- mav
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"Daniel Mayer" maveric149@yahoo.com wrote in message news:20051214181232.9008.qmail@web51610.mail.yahoo.com... --- Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
Bad idea. I don't know about other admins, but I use rollback for things other than vandalism and linkspam, such as widespread implementations of bad ideas. Most recent case: someone had modified the wording of about three dozen stub templates in a way that implied that a particular wikiproject had ownership over the articles in question.
How is that a bad idea? The page history is for showing how an article developed. If a bit of text is no longer in the article due to a revert for any purpose, then the edit that added it and the edit that removed it need not be there forever. A week is long enough. In addition to removing vandalism, the above idea would also help to de-clutter page histories.
Am I right in thinking that we're not talking about expunging these history entries from the database, simply deleting them.
So they will still show up as "deleted edits" which admins could restore if necessary.
Would it maybe be possible to fix it so that "deleted edits" show up in user contributions, labelled in some way, with restricted access?
Phil Boswell wrote:
Would it maybe be possible to fix it so that "deleted edits" show up in user contributions, labelled in some way, with restricted access?
A way of simultaneously viewing 'contributions', 'deleted edits', and 'log' entries such as image uploads and page moves would be exceedingly useful. The more clever vandals perform page move vandalism or replace pictures used in articles with vandalism images... and if you are just checking 'contributions' you would never see these things.
On 12/15/05, Conrad Dunkerson conrad.dunkerson@worldnet.att.net wrote:
Phil Boswell wrote:
Would it maybe be possible to fix it so that "deleted edits" show up in user contributions, labelled in some way, with restricted access?
A way of simultaneously viewing 'contributions', 'deleted edits', and 'log' entries such as image uploads and page moves would be exceedingly useful. The more clever vandals perform page move vandalism or replace pictures used in articles with vandalism images... and if you are just checking 'contributions' you would never see these things.
I agree. Clearly our software is not up to our requirements in this respect, in a number of ways.
Kelly
Phil Boswell wrote:
Am I right in thinking that we're not talking about expunging these history entries from the database, simply deleting them.
So they will still show up as "deleted edits" which admins could restore if necessary.
Would it maybe be possible to fix it so that "deleted edits" show up in user contributions, labelled in some way, with restricted access?
I think a part of the resistance to being more aggressive about cleaning up article histories comes from our inappropriate use of the term 'deleted' here. The edits aren't actually deleted, they are actually 'unpublished' or 'hidden' or 'dark'.
--Jimbo
On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
Would it maybe be possible to fix it so that "deleted edits" show up in user contributions, labelled in some way, with restricted access?
For those who don't know, there is a tool that does this at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kate/cgi-bin/archive_contribs. And while it isn't exactly why Phil asked for, it's better than nothing.
TD
On 13/12/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
I think that getting that set-up should be a top development priority. One idea:
A bot with sysop rights could be able to detect admin reverts fairly easily and delete both the vandalized versions that were reverted along with the admin's revert version (which would be pointless clutter at that point).
One problem is that this also removes the edits from the history of that user, which makes noticing a pattern of vandalism from a single user tougher. Not sure how significant this is, and there could well be a workaround, but...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
My belief is that in general we should be aggressive about removing vandalism from the page history. If there was an automated way to go through on a regular basis and remove reverted versions from the history, I would strongly support that we do so.
The only sensible counter-argument I know of in this area is a concern for future historians or contemporary researchers who would like to study the phenomenon of vandalism. For this, it seems more than enough to make such revisions available in some limited-access way. There's just no reason to keep this junk cluttering up the publicly-viewable article history.
My concern about these deletions is somewhat different. It is about being seen as selective about our history. Idiots say idiotic things, after which remains the fact that they said them. Being willing to delete the record when the complainer is sufficiently notable gives the wrong impression that we are willing to do their bidding. I wouldn't be surprised if we already had libelous material on less notable individuals; the target just doesn't know about it. If he did he might still not be in a position to act on it.
I do agree, however, that limited access is acceptable, and that in ordinary circumstances this material is of no value to the general public.
Ec