Threats: This page
<http://novorus.info/news/analytics/34163-vikipediya-soobschila-ob-ubiystve-nemcova-za-2-chasa-do-samogo-ubiystva.html>
(in Russian, very non-credible "source" of information, but has enough
following to make it to MK.ru), discuss a well known wikipedian Dmitry
Rozhkov. I saw these kinds of comments (in ru):
В любом случае данная страница появилась ОЧЕНЬ быстро! Только на ее
написание ушел бы час. Поэтому автора надо "брать" и выворачивать наизнанку!
(Translation: "in any case, this page appeared VERY quickly! It would have
taken at least an hour to write. That's why we should "grab" the author and
turn him inside out")
From MK.ru:
"Источник "МК" в сфере
IT-индустрии уверяет, что время правок дается по
московскому времени. "Можешь сейчас сам правку сделать и убедиться", -
аргументировал собеседник."
(Translation: The source in MK in IT industry confirms that the revision
time is given according to Moscow. "You can make a change yourself and see
for yourself" said the expert).
The problem is that this one case caused enough confusion that RU wiki
admins are looking for a way to state this at the top of the page. Showing
a short message at the top "all time is in UTC" seems to be easy and
obvious enough, and I am surprised it has not been done yet. Phabricator
task:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91255
Re implementation in the long term: The current HTML shows
<a href="..." title="..."
class="mw-changeslist-date">23:52, 18 February
2015</a> (localized, UTC)
Instead, we could show
<a href="..." title="..."
class="mw-changeslist-date"><time
datetime="2015-02-18 23:52">23:52, 18 February 2015
UTC</time></a>, and
let JS (if present) change it to the proper timezone.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Oliver Keyes <ironholds(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, not all users have JavaScript. But, on the core
of the proposal:
What threats? What users? How many, how serious? Have they been
reported to Legal and Community Advocacy? These are the questions we
tend to ask about this sort of issue. "Do we need to insert technical
features to prevent it?" tends to come after a series of occurrences,
and I'm only aware of two in the last six years or so. We shouldn't
let one-offs dictate our UI direction and bandwidth load.
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone
be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the
user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's
known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert
the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly
sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Yuri Astrakhan <yastrakhan(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
A few days ago, a well known Russian politician
Boris Nemtsov was
assassinated <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Boris_Nemtsov>
near
the Kremlin. This murder had a huge political
resonance, and conspiracy
theories flourished. Yet, one of the theories was due to Wikipedia's
representation of time - anonymous users see change history in UTC. This
confusion was so big, that several major publications, including
Moskovkij
Komsomolets
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovskij_Komsomolets>,
published articles
<
http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/02/28/vikipediya-zaranee-otchitalas-ob-ubiys…
(in
Russian) claiming that the wiki page proclaimed him dead before the
assassination. The MK article was later updated with the explanation, but
the damage has been done: a number of threats were made against the
editors.
In light of the above, I feel we need to
#1 Show a clear message at the top of all history-related pages for
anonymous users that the time is in UTC until #2
#2 JavaScript should fix time on the fly for all users
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks!
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