[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia groups on Facebook need monitoring for vandals

[Earle Martin]

I recently joined facebook.com, the social networking site. Facebook
allows people to form groups, and there are numerous ones matching
"Wikipedia". (I quite liked the one called "fricken wikipedia, its
4am!") The majority are silly ones titled with variations along the
lines of "Everything I know I learnt from Wikipedia", but there are
also some anti-Wikipedia or even pro-vandal groups, like this one:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2205217096 (sorry, you may not
be able to see that without an account) - "GLOBAL Wikipedia Vandals".

People are posting comments like this:

[[
Personally, I wish we could all collaborate on a mass group edit.
Imagine if we each created 50-100 sockpuppets, had access to a few
different computers each, and ran some scripting programs to speed up
our work for us...the only way i think it could be any better, is if
we actually had, say 10 admin accounts and could block the entire
recent changes patrol as well as the counter-vandalism unit, then go
about editing on a massive scale. Personally i think that would be a
testimony to the power of individual free-speech, not to mention an
intriguing social experiment.
]]

and this:

[[
I've played around with the idea of doing a lot of legit edits with
one account to apply for adminship eventually. It's something I'd like
to have done by the summer.

As for the mass vandalism idea, I love it. We should get some
interested parties. Whoever wants in, message me on Facebook (we'll
try not to leave most of the plan out in the open).
]]

This is worrying. We should probably try and keep an eye on these places.


-- 
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/