[Probably not the right place for this plea. Please forward to the right person. (See next to last paragraph below for my reason for using this forum.]
I am a new user of Wikipedia. It seems like a great project. Since about 1963, I have believed that the world needs a really big encyclopedia to access all knowledge about everything (before the internet, I estimated thousands of printed volumes). In the '80s I learned of the idea now called "hyperlink" and I knew, theoretically, how this could work as a continually updated virtual book. Nupedia and Wikipedia promise to fulfill this vision.
But the very second time I tried to add a suggestion I was referred to a page with this content:
============================================================ User is blocked
Eli wrote:
Your user name or IP address has been blocked by PierreAbbat. The reason given is this: Vandalized World Trade Center, William I of England. Removed large section of Napoleonic Code,
...
I am new to Wikipedia. The time I first saw this page, I had not yet registered a user name on Wikipedia. I plead innocent to these crimes.
Your ISP uses a caching server which hides both you and some asshole vandal behind the same IP address. We have no way of telling you apart, unfortunately.
I've unblocked the IP, and am putting it on a list to watch in case the vandal comes back as well as you.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Is there no better way to identify a user instead of a IP-adress? What when ip6 is used. Can it not be done by the mac-adress?
Giskart
Eli wrote in part:
============================================================ User is blocked From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Your user name or IP address has been blocked by PierreAbbat. The reason given is this: Vandalized World Trade Center, William I of England. Removed large section of Napoleonic Code,
You may contact the administrator to discuss the block.
Return to Main Page.
"Vandalizing the World Trade Center" may be an unfortunate, unthinking choice of words, but I am still deeply offended.
Indeed it is an unfortunate, unthinking choice of words. I'm glad to see that Pierre didn't in fact use those words.
(As for removing large sections of the Napoleonic Code: there are large sections of the IRS Code and the US Code I should like to delete and replace, but under our Constitution my opinion on this doesn't matter--when we vote Tuesday, DC will once again choose a Non-Voting Delegate to Congress.)
Again, nobody mentioned anything about "removing large sections of the Napoleonic Code". But I realise that you're joking; it's a nice pun. Especially when Pierre is ignoring the subject, it's easy to pretend that he's ignoring articles too. At least you had the presence of mind to not be offended by your own pun this time.
</grumpy response> <pleasant response>
I think you need to rethink the practice of blocking dynamic IP numbers. Not everyone lives in an area served by cable modems or DSL. Many of those who do cannot afford the additional expense of a high speed connection that is always on.
Now you have definitely got a point. Many adminsitrators block IP addresses routinely but fail to unblock them in a reasonable amount of time or even to check to see if they are dynamic. Yours is the second time that this problem has come to the attention of the list (the first time, several regulars were blocked). If we must block IPs, then we need to do so more intelligently!
The message advises me to "contact the administrator to discuss the block." This is nice. It would have been nicer if a hyperlink to the administrator's "mailto:" address were included. Unlike most websites, the Wikipedia home page offers no hyperlink to the webmaster. This is why I joined and wrote to this list. Probably there is a better place for this msg. If so, please forward this, and tell me.
The list is actually pretty appropriate; we'all are the webmasters. The easiest way to allow people to contact administrators would be to include a link to [[Wikipedia:Adminstrators]], where the individual administrator's user page can be found. Not every administrator has a readable email address there, but I do, and I've now marked myself for attention on that page. (Other administrators that publish their email addresses can join me.)
There are four things that need fixing here: my access to Wikipedia,
Already done by Brion.
your handling of dynamic IP addresses,
Definitely needs to be a priority.
an easy way to contact the Wikipedia webmaster or administrator,
A link to [[Wikipedia:Administrators]] will be a useful kludge for now.
and DC's voting rights.
I like your licence plates, even if that jerk Bush won't use them.
-- Toby
Hi,
I'd like to suggest two solutions to the blocking of dynamic IP addresses or proxies that may affect innocent users.
Solution #1: IP address blocks should expire after n days unless renewed by someone. That way, instead of forgetting to unblock people, at worst we forget to re-block them. In my opinion, it's better to fail to punish somone effectively than to punish someone who's innocent.
Solution #2: We should give blocked users a way to re-gain access to the site, namely by creating an account. I don't know if this is currently possible, but it should be. We can block accounts a lot easier than IP addresses. So we could basically say on the block page: "Because IP addresses cannot be reliably linked to individuals, it may be that you receive this message in error. In that case, or if you want to change your behavior, please create an account and sign in, and you can continue to use Wikipedia."
We might still reserve complete IP&account bans for those who abuse the account "backdoor", but this should be the exception, not the rule.
This would make our security softer, and hopefully more effective.
Regards,
Erik
Solution #2: We should give blocked users a way to re-gain access to the site, namely by creating an account. I don't know if this is currently possible, but it should be. We can block accounts a lot easier than IP addresses. So we could basically say on the block page: "Because IP addresses cannot be reliably linked to individuals, it may be that you receive this message in error. In that case, or if you want to change your behavior, please create an account and sign in, and you can continue to use Wikipedia."
I definitely agree with this. I was quite surprised to find that when my (proxy server) IP was banned, I was banned too - even though I was logged in.
Incidentally, my (default) proxy (194.117.133.196 cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) is banned again - my ISP also caters to the recent goatse.cx vandal. I know how to manually change my proxy, but other valid users on Blueyonder in south west England ([[user: Nosrail]] for example) may not.
Rob user:rbrwr
On Mon, Nov 04, 2002 at 07:36:48PM +0000, Rob Brewer wrote:
Incidentally, my (default) proxy (194.117.133.196 cache-haw.cableinet.co.uk) is banned again - my ISP also caters to the recent goatse.cx vandal. I know how to manually change my proxy, but other valid users on Blueyonder in south west England ([[user: Nosrail]] for example) may not.
Perhaps there's a way we can make use of the 'Client-ip' and 'X-forwarded-for' headers which are added by many ISPs' proxies.
I think it would be necessary to decide whether the actual IP address seemed to be a shared proxy or not when imposing the ban -- simply matching against these headers whenever they were persent would just make it easier for people with fixed IP addresses to avoid the ban.
It wouldn't help people with short-term IP address leases at all, of course.
-M-
On Monday 04 November 2002 16:31, Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
Perhaps there's a way we can make use of the 'Client-ip' and 'X-forwarded-for' headers which are added by many ISPs' proxies.
If you do that, you'll run afoul of me - I'm running Squid on the laptop, so the client ip is 127.0.0.1.
I think it would be necessary to decide whether the actual IP address seemed to be a shared proxy or not when imposing the ban -- simply matching against these headers whenever they were persent would just make it easier for people with fixed IP addresses to avoid the ban.
My criterion for banning is, if there are 3 vandalisms from an IP address, I check a sample of the IP's contributions. If there are no good-looking edits, I ban.
I suggest that IPs that have been unbanned because they're proxies be put on a list, and if someone tries to ban that IP, he be warned that he's banning a proxy.
phma
At 18:08 04/11/02 -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
My criterion for banning is, if there are 3 vandalisms from an IP address, I check a sample of the IP's contributions. If there are no good-looking edits, I ban.
This is a good policy, except that (as far as I can tell) when you check contribs for an IP address you only see edits made anonymously from that IP, but when you ban an IP you ban both anonymous and signed-in users at that IP. If a proxy or a shared computer has been used by an anonymous vandal and a useful signed-in user, the signed-in user will be blocked, and Wikipedia will lose the benefit of his edits.
Rob (rbrwr)
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 04:13, Rob Brewer wrote:
This is a good policy, except that (as far as I can tell) when you check contribs for an IP address you only see edits made anonymously from that IP, but when you ban an IP you ban both anonymous and signed-in users at that IP. If a proxy or a shared computer has been used by an anonymous vandal and a useful signed-in user, the signed-in user will be blocked, and Wikipedia will lose the benefit of his edits.
This needs to be changed, then. Either we have to see the signed-in contributions from an IP address, or blocking an IP address needs to not block signed-in users and we need a way of blocking signed-in users.
phma
On Sunday 03 November 2002 21:13, Toby Bartels wrote:
Again, nobody mentioned anything about "removing large sections of the Napoleonic Code". But I realise that you're joking; it's a nice pun. Especially when Pierre is ignoring the subject, it's easy to pretend that he's ignoring articles too. At least you had the presence of mind to not be offended by your own pun this time.
I wasn't ignoring the subject. I was at a friend's house getting his USB DSL modem to work with his new Linux box. It's a recent Mandrake distro, and there should have been instructions on how to make it work with Mandrake, but weren't. So I had to figure out which instructions were irrelevant (don't need to compile the module) and which had to be done differently.
phma
Pierre Abbat wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Again, nobody mentioned anything about "removing large sections of the Napoleonic Code". But I realise that you're joking; it's a nice pun. Especially when Pierre is ignoring the subject, it's easy to pretend that he's ignoring articles too. At least you had the presence of mind to not be offended by your own pun this time.
I wasn't ignoring the subject. I was at a friend's house getting his USB DSL modem to work with his new Linux box. It's a recent Mandrake distro, and there should have been instructions on how to make it work with Mandrake, but weren't. So I had to figure out which instructions were irrelevant (don't need to compile the module) and which had to be done differently.
And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?
Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked, I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only predicates. Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults relies on their also omitting articles ("the"). (These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their technical grammatical senses here.)
-- Toby
On Monday 04 November 2002 14:14, Toby Bartels wrote:
And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?
.oiro'aro'e. I was ignoring the selnoi (because I wasn't here to read the notci), not the sumti be fi li 1!
Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked, I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only predicates. Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults relies on their also omitting articles ("the"). (These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their technical grammatical senses here.)
daspo la'e lu munje nuncanja midju li'u gi'enai daspo la munje nuncanja midju
mu'omi'e .pier.
Pierre Abbat wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
And this led to sloppy grammar when blocking IPs on Wikipedia?
.oiro'aro'e. I was ignoring the selnoi (because I wasn't here to read the notci), not the sumti be fi li 1!
I'm hoping that the "1!" is a typo and should be "!!", or else I'll never understand this language. (Unless it's 1337, but that doesn't fit the rest.) Beginning words with periods is confusing enough ^_^.
Anyway, if you look at the clauses indicating why the IP was blocked, I'm certain that you'll find that they contain no subjects, only predicates. Eli's interpretation of these clauses as insults relies on their also omitting articles ("the"). (These terms "subject" and "article" are being used in their technical grammatical senses here.)
daspo la'e lu munje nuncanja midju li'u gi'enai daspo la munje nuncanja midju
What *is* this language/script, anyway? I've seen it here a couple of times.
mu'omi'e .pier.
mu'omi'e .tobi.
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 12:24, Toby Bartels wrote:
I'm hoping that the "1!" is a typo and should be "!!", or else I'll never understand this language. (Unless it's 1337, but that doesn't fit the rest.) Beginning words with periods is confusing enough ^_^.
The "1!" is not a typo. Lojban doesn't have a word for "subject" in the grammatical sense, so I said "sumti in place 1", which is close enough, and then closed the sentence with an exclamation mark. The periods are needed to distinguish among ".io.a", ".i.o'a", and ".i'o.a".
daspo la'e lu munje nuncanja midju li'u gi'enai daspo la munje nuncanja midju
What *is* this language/script, anyway? I've seen it here a couple of times.
See the [[Lojban]] article.
mu'omi'e .pier.
mu'omi'e .tobi.
"tobi" means "(8" and can't be a name. Having people named And (a Lojbanist) is confusing enough; there is now an article about a place named Them.
phma
On Sunday 03 November 2002 14:35, Eli wrote:
[Probably not the right place for this plea. Please forward to the right person. (See next to last paragraph below for my reason for using this forum.]
I am a new user of Wikipedia. It seems like a great project. Since about 1963, I have believed that the world needs a really big encyclopedia to access all knowledge about everything (before the internet, I estimated thousands of printed volumes). In the '80s I learned of the idea now called "hyperlink" and I knew, theoretically, how this could work as a continually updated virtual book. Nupedia and Wikipedia promise to fulfill this vision.
But the very second time I tried to add a suggestion I was referred to a page with this content:
============================================================ User is blocked From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Your user name or IP address has been blocked by PierreAbbat. The reason given is this: Vandalized World Trade Center, William I of England. Removed large section of Napoleonic Code,
You may contact the administrator to discuss the block.
Return to Main Page.
I am very sorry for this. I can't at the moment see what the IP address is, as Wikipedia is stuck, but we've had incidents before where a proxy server was blocked.
phma
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