Peter Jaros wrote:
One problem with bringing up a person's pre-Wikipedia history is that a reformed troll is likely to be, shall we say, tact-impaired. Such a person is *more* likely to be falsely accused of trolling (remembering that trolling includes intent). On the other hand, this history can greatly help arbitrators to decide how to deal with a user. Many people are simply bad at garnering sympathy for their point; it's a skill not everyone has. Simply accusing such people of trolling is likely to make matters worse and make the arbitrators' job harder.
The difference between being a troll or "tact-impaired" is minor enough that for most practical purposes it isn't worth considering.
Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to move away from deterrence strategies like bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees, and toward a reputation-management system like they have at Slashdot or Kuro5hin or eBay. A reputation-management system combines rewards with punishments. What's missing from Wikipedia's system is any kind of reward for GOOD behavior. Suppose, for example, we had a system where other users could rate our contributions, and the more positive your cumulative rating, the less scrutiny your edits are likely to receive from vandal-watchers. If we had that sort of system, we could focus monitoring for vandalism on people with low ratings. This would also give users an incentive to keep their ratings high so they wouldn't get hassled by others. Perhaps there could be other incentives as well, e.g., a high rating automatically makes you a sysop.
I think it would also be a good idea to set some kind of limit on the number of contributions accepted per day from each anonymous IP number -- a fairly small number, such as 5. Five contributions is enough for someone to get a feel for how Wikipedia works. After that, the software should tell them to register if they want to make further contributions. This way the Wikipedia would remain inviting to newbies but would add encouragement to enter the reputation-tracking system. It wouldn't entirely stop anonymous vandalism, but it would make it more difficult and would probably eliminate most of it.
--Sheldon Rampton
User HectorRodriguez has gone onto a rampage to remove the word "terrorist" in all September 11 related pages, causing a massive spaghetti-ing of the pages which I tried to revert, but have probably made more of a mess of things. Can somebody look at his contributions and help me to fix things?
Please note that Wik has now jumped on the bandwagon and is reverting my revrsions. One wonders of Hector might not be Wik in a new role.
Rick K
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Rick wrote:
User HectorRodriguez has gone onto a rampage to remove the word "terrorist" in all September 11 related pages, causing a massive spaghetti-ing of the pages which I tried to revert, but have probably made more of a mess of things. Can somebody look at his contributions and help me to fix things?
Please note that Wik has now jumped on the bandwagon and is reverting my revrsions. One wonders of Hector might not be Wik in a new role.
Rick K
Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=22055/*http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I think the main problem here is that you have very different politics. I guess you also find criticism of the US difficult.
I don't think you were correct to bring this straight to the mailing list.
If we are ever to write NPOV articles on political topics then we have to find ways of working through this. Some of Hector's criticism of the East Germany article was valid and the article has been edited. We are discussing the rest on the talk page.
People have very strong feelings on political topics. I find dealing with things calmly and factually works well.
Name calling never works. He seems to be a fairly orthodox communist. I think you accused him of being Al-Qaida.
Caroline (Secretlondon)
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
I think it would also be a good idea to set some kind of limit on the number of contributions accepted per day from each anonymous IP number -- a fairly small number, such as 5. Five contributions is enough for someone to get a feel for how Wikipedia works. After that, the software should tell them to register if they want to make further contributions. This way the Wikipedia would remain inviting to newbies but would add encouragement to enter the reputation-tracking system. It wouldn't entirely stop anonymous vandalism, but it would make it more difficult and would probably eliminate most of it.
I don't think anonymous vandalism is actually a big problem, in practice. Most gets reverted quickly with relatively little effort, and persistent vandals are IP-banned (and can be IP-banned by any sysop without prior authorization). The really sticky issues seem to be problem users with accounts, especially those who are not doing simple vandalism, but are causing problems in other ways.
-Mark
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to move away from deterrence strategies like bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees, and toward a reputation-management system like they have at Slashdot or Kuro5hin or eBay. A reputation-management system combines rewards with punishments. What's missing from Wikipedia's system is any kind of reward for GOOD behavior.
Well, there's no mechanized system, but there certainly is old fashioned human "reputation".
I'm not opposed, in the abstract, to reputation management systems of the type that you're talking about, other than to say that they are notoriously difficult to design well, notoriously easy to game-play, and generally lack the subtlety that old-fashioned human reputation has.
Different people do different things and gain positive reputation in many different ways. Some spend a lot of time writing original material on uncontroversial subjects. Some spend a lot of time writing here, about policy. Some do a lot of copy editing. Some sit on VotesForDeletion. Some look out for vandalism. Some spend a lot of time writing original material on *controversial* subjects, a risky and dangerous avocation for reputation. :-)
It's hard to imagine any sort of mechanized system which could begin to capture all the nuances.
On the other hand, reputation management systems can scale to a much larger size than the human system. Maybe.
There are sysops who I don't even know, who I've never spoken to, not in private email, not on the wiki, not on the mailing list.
A couple of people wrote to me with probably justified complaints about my appointments to the committees that I overlooked some very good people who I don't happen to know.
--Jimbo
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Sheldon Rampton wrote:
of reward for GOOD behavior. Suppose, for example, we had a system where other users could rate our contributions, and the more positive your cumulative rating, the less scrutiny your edits are likely to receive from vandal-watchers.
I think an automated system like that is going to be vulnerable to people working out ways to do it. Another possibility is to use a web of trust, that is each user builds a list of users that they personally trust on which they could include users directly (saying I trust this user) or indirectly (I trust everyone who user X trusts), and then people could filter recent changes removing only those that they trust.
The obvious downside is that it would take a lot of processing which is probably something we want to avoid at least in the immediate future.
Imran
On Feb 10, 2004, at 1:53 AM, Sheldon Rampton wrote:
Peter Jaros wrote:
One problem with bringing up a person's pre-Wikipedia history is that a reformed troll is likely to be, shall we say, tact-impaired. Such a person is *more* likely to be falsely accused of trolling (remembering that trolling includes intent). On the other hand, this history can greatly help arbitrators to decide how to deal with a user. Many people are simply bad at garnering sympathy for their point; it's a skill not everyone has. Simply accusing such people of trolling is likely to make matters worse and make the arbitrators' job harder.
The difference between being a troll or "tact-impaired" is minor enough that for most practical purposes it isn't worth considering.
There is a major difference which I failed to bring up explicitly if the first post. Obviously inflammatory content is inflammatory, intended or not. But the second half of arbitration is resolution. Arbitrators are granted a certain amount of authority by Jimbo for the purposes of resolution. If a person really is a troll, they should be treated differently than someone who has suffered from a lapse in tact. It should (may) be possible to reason with the latter; reasoning with the former is a complete waste of time.
In short, I think that off-Wikipedia evidence can be very useful to arbitrators in deciding how to work with a disputant.
Peter
-- ---<>--- -- A house without walls cannot fall. Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org -- ---<>--- --
I'm afraid this has to be learned the hard way.
Fred
From: Peter Jaros rjaros@shaysnet.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 20:40:28 -0500 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Known Trolls
If a person really is a troll, they should be treated differently than someone who has suffered from a lapse in tact. It should (may) be possible to reason with the latter; reasoning with the former is a complete waste of time.
In short, I think that off-Wikipedia evidence can be very useful to arbitrators in deciding how to work with a disputant.