[WikiEN-l] Colbert on the loose

[Cheney Shill]

Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>Just removed another tripling elephant population reference at
>[[Queenie (elephant)]], which had apparently been there for 2 weeks. I
>wonder how many more of these there are.

>Even more alarmingly,
>http://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=elephant%20population%20triple%20site%3Aen.wikipedia.org
>shows quite a few of these joke references have made their way into
>Google's cache.

>Ok, the current example is trivial, but maybe we need some sort of
>organised response to these kind of attacks, which will presumably
>become more common. What if an organised group starting planting
>"George Bush is dead" all over the place or something...

Yes, or a ferry sank in lake Michigan and 50 died.  I'm glad you're looking into this.  The same basic issue has come up in a variety of ways recently.  Part of it is simply numbers.  Unless you have enough people to watch over all the possible changes and undo them, there is no, hmmmm, process to respond to such attacks.  Consider yourself lucky that this wasn't a PR firm that quietly hired 50 temps to sit down and make blind edits to thousands of article sections over a few days.

While looking over this myself, I found a sourced article referring to a specific wildlife area where the elephant population had tripled, so having an automated search & replace isn't the answer.  OTOH, if the software can be told to watch for identical changes in many different articles over a short period, it's possible to at least set-up an alarm so, preferably, all editors can be notified and check that the change at least meet policy and are verifiable.  All editors because I doubt 10 admins want or even can deal with a truly dedicated attack.



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