On Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 12:47:20PM -0400, Stirling Newberry wrote:
The comments for the blog entry explain that it was just a very bad misinterpretation of the facts by Stirling.
Or conversely - the exploitation of well known bad presentation of the facts by wikipedia.
The interface is indeed confusing.
Both problems of image history display and imposter accounts can be solved by technical means.
The former by displaying changes to both uploaded image and its description on the same page, or as a stop-gap measure by changing the relevant MediaWiki: messages, to it more apparent history of what is being displayed.
The latter by implementing apropriate heuristics in a bot - one that would parse new users log (on IRC RC channel or some other way) and report suspicious accounts. They usually involve mixed latin-cyrillic scripts, added accents or similar letters (l<->I), so that's easy to detect and post relevant information on Wikipedia. However, as the problem is widely known, there's little need for urgent action here.
If you want to see those things fixed faster, please code.
Confusing interface notwithstanding, you should be more careful with such accusations. If you actually asked someone before posting, you would probably find that you're wrong. Scientific integrity requires evidence proportional to the boldness of your claim and it doesn't seem you tried hard enough to find the problems with yours.