On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Unforgettableid unforgettableid@gmail.com wrote:
A) Did I go too far when I did all the research I described above? Do you yourself often use the Range Contributions tool[4] for looking at vandals' ISPs' contributions?
Most of the people here aren't enwiki vandal hunters. Why don't you ask wikien-l instead?
B) What do you think are the chances that the same person made both the first[1] and the second[7] vandalistic edits? The IP addresses' binary representations are quite different.
Possible but unlikely. If you look at the reverse DNS, one is cpe-174-105-248-31.insight.res.rr.com and one is cpe-174-106-099-246.nc.res.rr.com. The latter looks like it's probably from RoadRunner in North Carolina, while the former has "insight" instead of "nc" -- not sure what that is, but they're probably geographically different groups of customers.
C) Why did no anti-vandalism software automatically revert either edit?
This list is for MediaWiki development and Wikimedia systems adminstration. The various auto-reverting bots are maintained by entirely different people, and you should ask them.
D) When I look at the history[9] of [[Patrick Stump]], I see that there were fourteen edits between 06:51 and 07:03, most vandalism. Yet the vandalistic edits come from a variety of IP addresses and usernames. The IP addresses differ widely from each other. Why is this?
Maybe because they're totally different people?
E) When comparing two vandals' edits in other situations, is there any quick way for editors to find out both IPs' hostnames, User-Agents, Accept-Charset strings, Accept-Language strings, screen resolutions, and/or IP geolocation results? I do very little vandalism removal, so I myself am not sure.
You can find out their reverse DNS and whois information through standard tools, such as the command-line utilities "dig" and "whois" or various websites that will run them for you. Geolocation services are provided by a variety of websites using different databases of varying quality. The rest is not available to unprivileged users, although some is available to checkusers (at least for logged-in users, dunno about anonymous).
F) Which netblocks do the most vandalism and the least useful editing? Which cities? Which entire countries? Should those netblocks, cities, and countries be forced to log in before editing?
That's a policy decision that would be made either by Wikimedia or individual wikis, not by devs/sysadmins, so this isn't the right list.
G) Wouldn't it be cool if some web browsers or ISPs would tell Wikipedia what a contributor's PPPoE username was whenever the contributor made an edit?
That's not very useful for people who don't use PPPoE, which is probably a large majority. We do have arrangements with some ISPs, like AOL, to send X-Forwarded-For headers so we can display users' real IP addresses rather than those of proxies. It's very unlikely that ISPs would be willing to give us their customers' names -- their customers pay them, we don't.
If you reply to only one of A), B), C), D), E), F), or G) then please use a different subject line than I used. And add a "(was: ...)" tag at the end of the subject line. That way, it'll be easier for others to follow just the parts of the discussion that they want to follow.
I don't think this discussion will go on for much longer anyway, and people would not appreciate it if I posted seven times as many responses to a thread that's largely off-topic to begin with.