[WikiEN-l] Miscellaneous Comments

[Geoff Burling]

1. It would be helpful to create a new position in Wikipedia, with
the powers to investigate charges of sockpuppety, & provide an answer
within a short period of time -- say 12 or 24 hours. Currently, one
has to attract the attention of a developer (who obviously is more
interested in adding or fixing the Wikimedia code), who then must
investigate before the relevant logs are purged.

What I'm envisioning is someone who does nothing more than receives
an allegation that "X is a sockpuppet of Y", checks the logs, & reports
whether the 2 accounts come from the same IP number, or a subnet
belonging to the same ISP. (I don't know exactly how nuch info is
captured in the logs, & whether it is possible for one to determine
if a given IP address is a dial-up connection or a proxy address.)
There has been some objections about making this kind of information
even partly available because it would violate contributor's privacy.

2. I think it would be proper to put a waiting period between successive
nominations for VfD, say 1 month between the 1st & 2nd nominations, 3
months between the 2nd & 3rd, 6 months between the 3rd & 4th, & 1 year
thereafter. It appears to me that VfD is increasingly being used by
POV warriors over articles & their contents -- & not in the case of
[[GNAA]].

3. Quality or quanitity of contributions do not inherently give an
editor any special standing or privileges on Wikipedia. One should be
required to defend or justify a controversial edit or comment by the
same standards whether one is a newbie making her/his 1st edit, or
someone in the top 100 list. Nor do these contributions give anyone
permission to be a potty mouth on either Wikipedia or any of its mailing
lists.

Geoff