Why is everybody SO CONCERNED about Wikisquatting?
What happened at na: is still a mystery. As it turns out, the situation is currently being remedied and it is being converted to real Nauruan (I have no idea whether it's real Nauruan for sure, but it sure as hell looks Nauruan to me). I'm not sure what on earth took place there to start all this, but I'm still thinking perhaps it wasn't a bad-faith contribution but rather a simple misunderstanding. Perhaps somebody should try to contact User:Nauru to find out what went on?
What happened at dz: is tantamount to simple vandalism. It is marginally possible that the page was in Hmong or Yi or another language that uses Roman consonantal letters for the transcription of tones, and it might need looking into.
So far, all cases of Wikisquatting have been caught. All of them have been caught - by me. And they have all been remedied smoothly (although in the case of dz:, not replaced with real content)
Gerard, do you have any contacts who might be able to write some real content in Dzongkha? And at least a passing familiarity with using Unicode for Tibetan would be preferable.
So it has only happened at two Wikipedias so far, and we don't know exactly what was going on with it anyways. And both cases were caught, by ME.
I find it upsetting that had I not done anything about the squatting I found, there would be no mass hysteria climaxing in almost unanimously approved suggestions to execute all inactive Wikipedias by firing squad.
And as of yet nobody has replied to the following basic but important concepts:
What is wrong with the current (not closing or locking small Wikipedias) system? All cases of squatting were caught and remedied.
How will the new (executing the poor inactive Wikipedias just for being inactive) policy help? Anybody wanting to squat on a Wikipedia is just as able to "show interest" for its re-opening and to translate the user interface to Squatterish, then create heaps of high-quality articles fraudulently (ie, not in the language they are supposedly in).
If we need for some reason to be paranoid and filter out all the WikiSquatters, I can only see the following solutions:
1. Ask an areal linguist if the content is legit (hey wait a sec, if we have access to this linguist why aren't they actually adding content???) * According to Mr Meijssen, this is not feasible (for whatever reason)
2. Permanently delete all inactive Wikipedias and never create a new Wikipedia again. * Not a very good idea, but it works better than the current proposal
3. Abandon the project entirely and call the whole thing off as a failure. * There's no real reason to do this, right now things are going well. This would be like cutting the nose off to spite the face.
So in conclusion, I will put forth another proposal:
Monthly logs are kept publicly of the checks of inactive Wikis for vandalism, squatting, and the like, and what actions were taken. In addition, a list of inactive Wikis is maintained. Thus, if I am doing a routine check and find that a previously inactive Wikipedia now has hundreds of non-fraudulent articles and a couple of users and nothing strange is happening, I can remove it from the list. Also, maintainers of small Wikipedias who will be away from the computer for a few weeks or longer could add their Wikipedia so that nothing happens to it while they're gone. * Who: Me, others (some guesses at who might be interested include A-giau/H. Tan Tenn, David Cannon, Pablo Sartxaga, Mustafaa, . . .)
Perhaps those who volunteer to do this and do it for a while without any problems (ie, aiding spammers or spamming themselves) could be given a sort of "temporary sysop status" at all inactive Wikipedias which could be revoked once the Wikipedia became active (non-fraudulently).
Another possibility that could improve such a proposal is coordination. That way, no more than 2 people end up checking the same Wikipedia in a set interval, but no inactive Wikipedia gets past without being checked. A lot of time and effort could be saved, and chances are more people would be willing to do it if it didn't amount to each person checking ALL inactive Wikipedias.
Thoughts?
Mark
"183812 2898, 988 4888580 887 8940152 926, 887 82 982? 408847 387 87 982 8 @189782897? 408847 88 17 8@608 8@289 '887208198@08' 48@7 5 889?" --980@ 1808979, a.k.a. "912"
On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:17:55 +0100, Paweł 'Ausir' Dembowski fallout@lexx.eu.org wrote:
As far as new languages are concerned, I'm worried also about wikisquatters, which can take over inactive wikipedias...
-- Ausir mailto:fallout@lexx.eu.org http://fallout.scifi.pl ICQ 41090834 GG 2730728