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Subject: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted hand" status Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 15:48:28 -0700 From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com
I'm sure many of you have noticed that recently there has been a growing problem of people creating user accounts for the sole purpose of using wikipedia's upload utility to place copyrighted and otherwise inappropriate material on the server.
We might want to discuss further limiting the use of this utility because it's abuse is beginning to be a maintenance issue for the syops and the presence of these bogus user accounts is also over-reporting the number of true (as in contributing) users we have.
I know the "trusted hand" status is in the database already so it might be easy to limit upload ability to "trusted hand" or greater status users. It would also be nice to have this status granted automatically if say two conditions are met: 1) a user account is at least 30 days old and 2) this user has edited a certain number of articles (I would be liberal and set this at 30, but I wouldn't mind having it set at up to 100).
And while we are at it we might also want to grant trusted hands the ability to do things that currently only sysops can do -- like move pages or edit certain protected pages (those set to "is_trusted" perhaps? "is_sysop" would then only be used to protect certain established policy pages and for emergencies -- if a "trusted hand" went on a rampage it would be simple to just change the user's status). I wonder if a script could be written to change the status of all current users that have edited a certain number of articles? The sysops could always do this by hand if need be.
Oh, and if something like this were established we should encourage sysops to manually promote new users that are able to understand the wikipedia concept and its policies early to "trusted hand" status before the 30day&30article requirement is met.
Just a thought....
maveric149
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The trusted hand requirement sounds quite reasonable to me. The fact is that there are people using the upload facility as storage space for their own personal junk and there just isn't enough room for it. People like that do NOT sign up and stick around for a month to load their stuff up - they see the opportunity and go for it on the spot. Just delaying it would probably cut the amount of junk in half at least. And if you add the requirememt for contributing to articles beforehand, well then that gets rid of even more of them!
When they gave users the ability to link to graphics in their diaries on the open diary site they made the requirement that you had had a diary for more than 30 days and/or made more than 30 entries into it, to prevent people starting new diaries just to upload pr0n pics to shock people... they took the requirement off again about six months later, but it had been there long enough that most people realised that they couldn't do that any more.
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