Recent patrol seems to be a better game than anything you can buy. Zappin vandalism before cluebot or another rcer and bangin up counts is very cool. ICQ is full on afternoons of did ya see that? AIV listed in 30secs. What on earth is this game? The worst thing is that these editors are mentoring/tutoring new editors to slow down.
The current RC game is lame. Flagged rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse. Abusers never get tagged until they are met with a real time Rcer/s and a great deal of the abuse is to game a GOOGLE bot abuse, cleaned within a minute, but could well be cached for a week.
Oy I don't know how google pick and choose articles to cache. It is a game (wp:beans lol).
Can I mess about with an American icon under a proxy for 3 days? I wouldn't even want to try.
mike
2008/5/2 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
Recent patrol seems to be a better game than anything you can buy. Zappin vandalism before cluebot or another rcer and bangin up counts is very cool. ICQ is full on afternoons of did ya see that? AIV listed in 30secs. What on earth is this game? The worst thing is that these editors are mentoring/tutoring new editors to slow down.
The current RC game is lame. Flagged rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse. Abusers never get tagged until they are met with a real time Rcer/s and a great deal of the abuse is to game a GOOGLE bot abuse, cleaned within a minute, but could well be cached for a week.
Oy I don't know how google pick and choose articles to cache. It is a game (wp:beans lol).
Can I mess about with an American icon under a proxy for 3 days? I wouldn't even want to try.
mike
Funny...for completely different reasons, I ran across a block that probably resulted from exactly this "game" - relatively inexperienced user trying to remove "sourced content", warned by 3 different users, blocked by another. The only catch was - the now-blocked editor, as sloppy as his edits were, was actually correct. The information he was removing was being attributed to references that said no such thing. After a few similarly unpleasant encounters, the rarely posting editor flamed out and was indef blocked. Subsequent evidence suggests he was probably the subject of the BLP for which he was blocked.
Speed isn't quite everything.
Risker
How was his edit summary usage? Quite often these gamers will use cheats and codes such as non-summarised edits to help get exp points. This can be contradicted using the spell found in Special:Preferences.
2008/5/2 Alex G g1ggyman@gmail.com:
How was his edit summary usage? Quite often these gamers will use cheats and codes such as non-summarised edits to help get exp points. This can be contradicted using the spell found in Special:Preferences.
Dunno - Yeah that Google gaming sounds weird. It's obvious disruptive edits which the IP reverts. AGF says it was a sandboxing mistake, so you move on . k maybe I am dreaming. the lulz is with google cache and that can stay there for weeks. Ip without a warning cus you can't really warn about a sandbox reverse. It was only there for seconds. or am I dreaming?
mike
On May 1, 2008, at 11:11 PM, Risker wrote:
Funny...for completely different reasons, I ran across a block that probably resulted from exactly this "game" - relatively inexperienced user trying to remove "sourced content", warned by 3 different users, blocked by another. The only catch was - the now-blocked editor, as sloppy as his edits were, was actually correct. The information he was removing was being attributed to references that said no such thing. After a few similarly unpleasant encounters, the rarely posting editor flamed out and was indef blocked. Subsequent evidence suggests he was probably the subject of the BLP for which he was blocked.
Speed isn't quite everything.
Yet another reason why our fetishistic obsession with sources needs to be toned down. By treating them as the be-all and end-all of content we make it far too easy to get utter lies through by citing them to a source. The worst are book sources - I know Danny, at one point, created a hoax article cited to a non-existent book with the ISBN of a Dr. Seuss book. This, of course, attracted no notice while we zealously remove entire accurate articles on important subjects for a lack of sources.
Wish I could remember what the article he created was so I could go delete it. He did it under a sock. It was on an African politician. I probably should have deleted it at the time, but I didn't feel like starting a fight with Danny.
/sigh
In any case, the point is, our sourcing policies have a tangental relationship at best to quality.
-Phil
On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 00:10 -0400, Philip Sandifer wrote:
Yet another reason why our fetishistic obsession with sources needs to be toned down. By treating them as the be-all and end-all of content we make it far too easy to get utter lies through by citing them to a source. The worst are book sources - I know Danny, at one point, created a hoax article cited to a non-existent book with the ISBN of a Dr. Seuss book. This, of course, attracted no notice while we zealously remove entire accurate articles on important subjects for a lack of sources.
The problem is not our obsession with sourcing. The problem is the attitude of editors who see something is sourced, and immediately assume the source actually stated the fact/claim.
Wish I could remember what the article he created was so I could go delete it. He did it under a sock. It was on an African politician. I probably should have deleted it at the time, but I didn't feel like starting a fight with Danny.
[[Edward Mipongwa]]. It was deleted end of February when he mentioned it on his blog.
KTC
On May 2, 2008, at 12:58 AM, Kwan Ting Chan wrote:
The problem is not our obsession with sourcing. The problem is the attitude of editors who see something is sourced, and immediately assume the source actually stated the fact/claim.
The latter is a fairly unavoidable consequence of the former, I should think. Or, perhaps more accurately, of applying the former to every statement in every article, which is unmanageable.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
Yet another reason why our fetishistic obsession with sources needs to be toned down. By treating them as the be-all and end-all of content we make it far too easy to get utter lies through by citing them to a source. The worst are book sources - I know Danny, at one point, created a hoax article cited to a non-existent book with the ISBN of a Dr. Seuss book. This, of course, attracted no notice while we zealously remove entire accurate articles on important subjects for a lack of sources.
This all comes from spoon-feeding readers into the expectation that sources have been accurately interpreted. Similarly with copyright if we purport to guarantee that our material is reusable the reusers take that as an excuse to avoid their own due diligence.
Wish I could remember what the article he created was so I could go delete it. He did it under a sock. It was on an African politician. I probably should have deleted it at the time, but I didn't feel like starting a fight with Danny.
Not starting a fight with X probably comes up more often than it should. We weigh accuracy against the willingness to engage in a protracted fight with some known tendentious individual.
Ec
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 12:10 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Wish I could remember what the article he created was so I could go delete it. He did it under a sock. It was on an African politician. I probably should have deleted it at the time, but I didn't feel like starting a fight with Danny.
So it's still out there? Nice.
2008/5/3 WODUP wikiwodup@gmail.com:
So it's still out there? Nice.
No, it was deleted in February apparently.
Something I read once... a lot of the time, users will blank a page not for testing or malicious purposes, but because there is a serious problem with the article. Particularly if it's with a BLP, please be especially patient with the "vandal", as it may well be the subject themself. Discussion of the issue can help immensely, and maybe even make a productive editor instead of a pissed off BLP victim.
2008/5/2 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
Can I mess about with an American icon under a proxy for 3 days? I wouldn't even want to try.
I'm not exactly a technophobe, having written my first computer program while still at school, in 1973, and made my living exclusively from programming computers in three decades. I have become familiar with, then expert in, software technologies devised by people who were not even born when I left school, so I'm no stick-in-the-mud.
I do have a problem with the above posting, however, and that problem is that it was so full of jargon that I could not really understand it. The quoted section is only a small part of the problem. What, in this context, is "an American icon"? One of those little smudgy pictures of a flag as sometimes used on Wikipedia, perhaps? Or a famous American like Madonna? What is the meaning of "proxy" in this context? I suppose the most likely candidate here is an anonymizing http proxy, a program that attempts to conceal the origin of your online requests.
The trouble is, neither of the interpretations available from the above analysis makes any sense. Moreover the complaint about RC (Recent Changes patrol, perhaps?) was incomprehensible. "Flagged rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse." Eh?
Moreover the complaint about Google caching appears to be technologically illiterate: the content of the Google cache has absolutely no effect on the content of Wikipedia pages. We should no more worry about it that we should worry about some drunk's interpretation of a misheard conversation in a pub.
Recent changes is a necessary job, and a pretty simple one that has become more automated over the past three years. It is necessary to be clear about what it involves, however: examining edits and removing bad ones. Failing to recognise that stark simplicity can lead, and appears to have led here, to the adoption of obscure and confusing jargon, the invention of problems that either don't exist or are outside the purview of a website by any reasonable definition, and resulting time wasted talking about non-problems.
On 03/05/2008, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/2 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
Can I mess about with an American icon under a proxy for 3 days? I
wouldn't
even want to try.
I'm not exactly a technophobe, having written my first computer program while still at school, in 1973, and made my living exclusively from programming computers in three decades. I have become familiar with, then expert in, software technologies devised by people who were not even born when I left school, so I'm no stick-in-the-mud.
I do have a problem with the above posting, however, and that problem is that it was so full of jargon that I could not really understand it. The quoted section is only a small part of the problem. What, in this context, is "an American icon"? One of those little smudgy pictures of a flag as sometimes used on Wikipedia, perhaps? Or a famous American like Madonna? What is the meaning of "proxy" in this context? I suppose the most likely candidate here is an anonymizing http proxy, a program that attempts to conceal the origin of your online requests.
The trouble is, neither of the interpretations available from the above analysis makes any sense. Moreover the complaint about RC (Recent Changes patrol, perhaps?) was incomprehensible. "Flagged rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse." Eh?
Moreover the complaint about Google caching appears to be technologically illiterate: the content of the Google cache has absolutely no effect on the content of Wikipedia pages. We should no more worry about it that we should worry about some drunk's interpretation of a misheard conversation in a pub.
Recent changes is a necessary job, and a pretty simple one that has become more automated over the past three years. It is necessary to be clear about what it involves, however: examining edits and removing bad ones. Failing to recognise that stark simplicity can lead, and appears to have led here, to the adoption of obscure and confusing jargon, the invention of problems that either don't exist or are outside the purview of a website by any reasonable definition, and resulting time wasted talking about non-problems.
Ooops sorry Tony, "Flagged rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse." was an attempt at explaining the problem where several edits have been made by unregistered/not logged in editors who have vandalised pages and the editor monitoring recent changes has used their automated rollback rights to restore another vandal edit.
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an attempt to explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point to it being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google cache may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
This thread and the "Another example of a bad biographical article" thread will hopefully become redundant when flagged/sighted revisions transform the copy that readers see. I do also appreciate that attempts to explain some routines in Wikipedia do often use phrases completely out of context, though surely I am not the only one guilty.
mike
2008/5/3 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an attempt to explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point to it being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google cache may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
I'm not sold on this as anything more than a convenient way of justifying an assumption of it being malicious.
The google cache for a given page updates anything from daily to once a month. If we assume they vandalise, leave it for two minutes, and clean up, then they're doing this with - at best - a 0.15% chance of having the vandalism cached. On a low traffic page (most are), it becomes even smaller.
It seems implausible that anyone would on the one hand be cunning and subtle enough to systematically think of the google cache, but on the other not realise how much of a waste of time this would be.
2008/5/3 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/5/3 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an
attempt to
explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point
to it
being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google
cache
may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
I'm not sold on this as anything more than a convenient way of justifying an assumption of it being malicious.
The google cache for a given page updates anything from daily to once a month. If we assume they vandalise, leave it for two minutes, and clean up, then they're doing this with - at best - a 0.15% chance of having the vandalism cached. On a low traffic page (most are), it becomes even smaller.
It seems implausible that anyone would on the one hand be cunning and subtle enough to systematically think of the google cache, but on the other not realise how much of a waste of time this would be.
Dunno plausibility could be argued about all day. Your math is outta sight, in any given instance it would be much much lower than anything resembling 0.15%. AGF would presume that a warning would be inappropriate because we can't see the motive behind the edits. Maybe I am guilty of [[WP:BEANS]] implying that a new game exists, but it is certainly a strange and annoying kind of editing when somebody vandalises, restores, vandalises and restores ad infinitum with editors stuck (a) attempting to consider what motive lie behind the edits and (b) [[WP:AIV]] would surely question test edit warnings that aren't disruptive.
mike
On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:57 PM, michael west michawest@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/3 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/5/3 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an
attempt to
explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point
to it
being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google
cache
may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
I'm not sold on this as anything more than a convenient way of justifying an assumption of it being malicious.
The google cache for a given page updates anything from daily to once a month. If we assume they vandalise, leave it for two minutes, and clean up, then they're doing this with - at best - a 0.15% chance of having the vandalism cached. On a low traffic page (most are), it becomes even smaller.
It seems implausible that anyone would on the one hand be cunning and subtle enough to systematically think of the google cache, but on the other not realise how much of a waste of time this would be.
Dunno plausibility could be argued about all day. Your math is outta sight, in any given instance it would be much much lower than anything resembling 0.15%. AGF would presume that a warning would be inappropriate because we can't see the motive behind the edits. Maybe I am guilty of [[WP:BEANS]] implying that a new game exists, but it is certainly a strange and annoying kind of editing when somebody vandalises, restores, vandalises and restores ad infinitum with editors stuck (a) attempting to consider what motive lie behind the edits and (b) [[WP:AIV]] would surely question test edit warnings that aren't disruptive.
mike
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I think the first thing to do with such edits would be to refer the editor to the sandbox (which the lower level test/vandalism templates do anyway), since they may just be making test edits to see what happens. Of course, if they ignore that advice and persist, stronger warnings and blocks could follow as normal. I don't see any reason or need for special handling here.
2008/5/3 Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com:
On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:57 PM, michael west michawest@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/3 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/5/3 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an
attempt to
explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and
quickly
restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would
point
to it
being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the
cache
may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
I'm not sold on this as anything more than a convenient way of justifying an assumption of it being malicious.
The google cache for a given page updates anything from daily to once a month. If we assume they vandalise, leave it for two minutes, and clean up, then they're doing this with - at best - a 0.15% chance of having the vandalism cached. On a low traffic page (most are), it becomes even smaller.
It seems implausible that anyone would on the one hand be cunning and subtle enough to systematically think of the google cache, but on the other not realise how much of a waste of time this would be.
Dunno plausibility could be argued about all day. Your math is outta
sight,
in any given instance it would be much much lower than anything
resembling
0.15%. AGF would presume that a warning would be inappropriate because
we
can't see the motive behind the edits. Maybe I am guilty of
[[WP:BEANS]]
implying that a new game exists, but it is certainly a strange and annoying kind of editing when somebody vandalises, restores, vandalises
and
restores ad infinitum with editors stuck (a) attempting to consider
what
motive lie behind the edits and (b) [[WP:AIV]] would surely question
test
edit warnings that aren't disruptive.
mike
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I think the first thing to do with such edits would be to refer the editor to the sandbox (which the lower level test/vandalism templates do anyway), since they may just be making test edits to see what happens. Of course, if they ignore that advice and persist, stronger warnings and blocks could follow as normal. I don't see any reason or need for special handling here.
{{test1}} is pretty specific - it certainly can't be used in the instances of editing explained. The edits already acknowledge that bad edits can be removed. Carrying on the same type of edits over tens of pages only annoys and disruption is low.
BLP is a concern and recent change zapping is an issue if patrollers do it off the cuff without evaluating the actual change of edit.
mike