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.

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.

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.

So it's still out there? Nice.

2008/5/2 michael west <michawest(a)gmail.com>om>: wouldn't 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.

2008/5/3 michael west <michawest(a)gmail.com>om>: attempt to to it cache 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.

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:57 PM, michael west <michawest(a)gmail.com> wrote: quickly point google sight, resembling we [[WP:BEANS]] and what test 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.