i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot wasn't logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some kind of limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so that it's harder to use a bot.
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On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:30:57AM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot wasn't logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some kind of limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so that it's harder to use a bot.
Your own flood of tiny, continual edits is as annoying as the city bot. You are making the Recent Changes page useless again. Perhaps you could use the Preview button a lot while you are editing, then think, cogitate, invest some mental effort, and make a real contribution other than changing an articles punctuation, and taking 10 edits to do so?
Jonathan
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 07:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:30:57AM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot wasn't logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some kind of limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so that it's harder to use a bot.
Your own flood of tiny, continual edits is as annoying as the city bot. You are making the Recent Changes page useless again. Perhaps you could use the Preview button a lot while you are editing, then think, cogitate, invest some mental effort, and make a real contribution other than changing an articles punctuation, and taking 10 edits to do so?
It would be a beneficial habit for Lir to start using the Minor Edit button.
I am actually fairly guilty of this, particularly when working on pages with complex tables. Is this really such a big deal? Save often is my motto. But I'll save less frequently if the consensus suggests this is the right way to go....
----- Original Message ----- From: "The Cunctator" cunctator@kband.com To: wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 4:38 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] vandal bots
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 07:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:30:57AM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot
wasn't
logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some
kind of
limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so
that
it's harder to use a bot.
Your own flood of tiny, continual edits is as annoying as the city bot. You are making the Recent Changes page useless again. Perhaps you could use the Preview button a lot while you are editing, then think, cogitate, invest some mental effort, and make a real contribution other than changing an articles punctuation, and taking 10 edits to do so?
It would be a beneficial habit for Lir to start using the Minor Edit button.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Steve Callaway wrote:
I am actually fairly guilty of this, particularly when working on pages with complex tables. Is this really such a big deal? Save often is my motto. But I'll save less frequently if the consensus suggests this is the right way to go....
I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*. However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.
As for saving often, that's certainly good policy. But you may have to save in an external editor instead. Indeed, you may want to do all of the editing externally, only copying the text to the Wikipedia edit box when you want to preview the wiki markup.
My browser crashes more often than my external editor, in any case.
-- Toby
Be sure that if you save into an external editor, that you re-type your apostrophes and quotation marks when you paste back into the Wiki space, some editors' special characters show up as weird characters on Wiki. Zoe Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu wrote:Steve Callaway wrote:
I am actually fairly guilty of this, particularly when working on pages with complex tables. Is this really such a big deal? Save often is my motto. But I'll save less frequently if the consensus suggests this is the right way to go....
I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*. However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.
As for saving often, that's certainly good policy. But you may have to save in an external editor instead. Indeed, you may want to do all of the editing externally, only copying the text to the Wikipedia edit box when you want to preview the wiki markup.
My browser crashes more often than my external editor, in any case.
-- Toby _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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I can't tell who wrote this, but am compelled to reply.
| |I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*. |However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people. |
My own practice is to hide punctuation, spelling, linking changes unless I want to engage in the minor publicity of putting an article in Recent Changes so that others will know it exists and perhaps add to it themselves.
Your not hiding minor edits might be a big deal to *others* if you clutter the Recent Changes with all *your* precious apostrophes and spelling corrections.
Some thoughtless people (readers of this list, I believe) are even putting moves from a private chess game into Recent Changes for reasons unfathomable to polite people.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
Ortolan88 wrote in part:
Toby Bartels wrote:
I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*. However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.
And Ortolan seems to have misinterpreted "hide".
Hiding minor edits is something that the *reader* does. It's an option in user preference to hide from lists of edits (like Recentchanges and watchlists) those edits that were marked minor. I myself never do this; when I view Recentchanges, I see every single edit, since that's what I want to see.
OTOH, what the writer does is to *mark* minor edits. I always mark punctuation, spelling, and linking changes in this way (regardless of whether I'm interested in publicity). Nobody will see my apostrophes and spelling corrections if they, as readers, hide minor edits in their user preferences. (There are exceptions where I forget, but these are simply mistakes.)
Some thoughtless people (readers of this list, I believe) are even putting moves from a private chess game into Recent Changes for reasons unfathomable to polite people.
Everything goes into Recentchanges, every edit whatsoever. What you mean is that these thoughtless (I agree) people aren't marking the moves as minor edits. If they did so, then people who (like you) hide minor edits wouldn't see the game show up in Recentchanges, although people who (like me) don't hide minor edits would continue to see it (a risk that we choose to take).
I hope that this clarifies my language.
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
OTOH, what the writer does is to *mark* minor edits. I always mark punctuation, spelling, and linking changes in this way (regardless of whether I'm interested in publicity). Nobody will see my apostrophes and spelling corrections if they, as readers, hide minor edits in their user preferences. (There are exceptions where I forget, but these are simply mistakes.)
I too have chosen not to hide minor edits, and it often happens that some changes that are marked as minor aren't that minor at all. It can be an effective tool for sneaking in a point of view.
Some thoughtless people (readers of this list, I believe) are even putting moves from a private chess game into Recent Changes for reasons unfathomable to polite people.
I've seen this, but it is going back and forth on their user talk pages where there is some latitude. Quaint but harmless. I generally don't look at all the material on user talk-pages unless I'm involved in a current conversation with them.
Some years age I knew a person who played long distance telephone chess. All the calls were made collect from a fictitious person, and the call was refused. The fictitious person's name was a coded chess move.
Eclecticology
Zoe wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Indeed, you may want to do all of the editing externally, only copying the text to the Wikipedia edit box when you want to preview the wiki markup.
Be sure that if you save into an external editor, that you re-type your apostrophes and quotation marks when you paste back into the Wiki space, some editors' special characters show up as weird characters on Wiki.
You may be able to do this automatically in a word processor by saving as plain text (no formatting), closing the file, and then opening the plain text (*.txt) file to copy and paste.
Better yet, use a true text editor, not a word processor. That is, use Notepad, not Word.
-- Toby
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