What would happen if a signed-in user started writing the following all over Wikipedia? How would we deal with it? (Purely a hypothetical case, I assure you ;-)
"I hate everybody and everything. I will destroy Wikipedia, and you can't stop me. Your own stupid rules forbid it, BWAH HA HA HA!"
Ed Poor
On 11/11/02 12:09 PM, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
What would happen if a signed-in user started writing the following all over Wikipedia? How would we deal with it? (Purely a hypothetical case, I assure you ;-)
"I hate everybody and everything. I will destroy Wikipedia, and you can't stop me. Your own stupid rules forbid it, BWAH HA HA HA!"
For someone who really doesn't like swearing, you seem to do it a lot.
We'd revert the changes, and probably publicly wonder what the user's problem is. I for example would question the "hate everybody and everything" assertion. Is that really possible? I mean, it takes a lot of energy to truly hate. And then there's the question of if you hate everybody and everything, why have you not committed suicide? And why choose Wikipedia as a target? I mean, really. WP does not have that much influence or importance, especially if the targets of your hatred are "everybody" and "everything".
Writing the above all over Wikipedia is hardly the way to destroy it.
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
What would happen if a signed-in user started writing the following all over Wikipedia? How would we deal with it? (Purely a hypothetical case, I assure you ;-)
"I hate everybody and everything. I will destroy Wikipedia, and you can't stop me. Your own stupid rules forbid it, BWAH HA HA HA!"
Well it's not hypothetical any more: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AFucking_Asshole
Could we have a vague policy that profanity is not okay for user names? (vague because people's idea of profanity doesn't always match -- we'd have to decide on a case by case basis)
On 11/11/02 12:36 PM, "tarquin" tarquin@planetunreal.com wrote:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
What would happen if a signed-in user started writing the following all over Wikipedia? How would we deal with it? (Purely a hypothetical case, I assure you ;-)
"I hate everybody and everything. I will destroy Wikipedia, and you can't stop me. Your own stupid rules forbid it, BWAH HA HA HA!"
Well it's not hypothetical any more: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AFucking_Asshole
I believe Ed created the account himself, I suppose to prove a point. At least it has his email address. I haven't checked the IP logs to make sure.
Ed Poor wrote:
What would happen if a signed-in user started writing the following all over Wikipedia? How would we deal with it? (Purely a hypothetical case, I assure you ;-)
"I hate everybody and everything. I will destroy Wikipedia, and you can't stop me. Your own stupid rules forbid it, BWAH HA HA HA!"
That's clearly vandalism, of a fairly ordinary sort, so the user should be banned; there's no doubt there. The only problem is that, due to a technical feature (that you can't find out the user's IP number without looking directly into the database), most administrators don't have the power to ban the user. (We all have the authority, however; we all may ban vandals.)
I suppose that the administrators might take a closer look and realise that there were mitigating circumstances, such as we have here, where the vandal is a trusted user (in fact an administrator himself) that we know will clean his mess up, and was simply trying to make a point, however "poor"ly (as he later admits). With clear guidelines and policies about how banning works, however, we might be in a situation where we're not allowed to make an exception. *That*'s an important point.
-- Toby
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