On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 05:03:04PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 09:35, Anthere wrote: > > What's nice about Wikipedia is that noone *can* rip > > pages out of the books. > > They can put salt in the sugar dispenser. > > Since we are at it, is that Rebol stuff about bots > generation true ?? > > http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikifr-l/2002-November/000084.html > > Brion ??? Hmm, I'm not sure I understand the question. That it's easy to write bots that can post to the wiki using Rebol? My impression is that this is true, but I'm not very familiar with that language. Of course there's a potential for abuse, but that's not specific to Rebol;it's inherent in allowing random people to edit our site over the network.
Brion is right. Rebol is just another language in which people can write scripts to spam the wikipedia. You can write one in Perl, C, Python, Scheme, Haskell, Mercury, or any number of other languages. It doesn't take much skill either.
Of course, if we ever do get massive spamming from a script, we can massively roll back the spam. (ie, we can take the salt back out of our coffee after some joker got us to pour it in.)
Correct.
I present myself : I am just the one who wrote the bot Anthere were talking about.
This bot allows anyone to post anything on Wikipedia (only phase III Wikipedias). The bot is under the GPL license so anyone can access to the source. It's a choice. Everyone should be able to know how this bot works and how Wikipedia works. Even if it allows script kiddies to attack Wikipedia's system.
What do you think about it ?
Athymik (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Athymik)
PS : Sorry for my bad english...