[WikiEN-l] JarlaxleArtemis/Grawp

[Ian Woollard]

I cannot deny that it would likely to be effective; but it would
also cause ill-will and bad publicity towards the wikipedia.

The wikipedia is accessed by a large fraction of their thousands of
customers every day, people that we're really supposed to be
helping; and they've done nothing worth getting blocked over.

So it really would be a sledge hammer to crack a nut, and the guy is
irritating, but he's not impacting nearly as many people as would be
hurt by a block like that.

I think the wikipedia is better off coming up with general strategies
that make his kind of vandalism pointless or easier to undo or
strategies to permit
blocking of just the active vandals.

On 25/12/2008, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 3:31 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On 25/12/2008, Soxred93 <soxred93 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> If we rangeblock all of Verizon, we're giving Grawp exactly what he
>>> wants. He wants to cause disruption, and causing a huge rangeblock is
>>> success for him.
>>
>> It doesn't matter what he does or doesn't want. It only matters what
>> the wikipedia wants. Probably rangeblocking Verizon would be bad for
>> the Wikipedia's reputation ("Anyone can edit except for Verizon
>> users!"), Verizon would have to be incredibly unresponsive and acting
>> in incredibly bad faith to have to/really want to do that, but it
>> remains a possibility.
>>
>> There might be a better case though for automatically, temporarily,
>> black holing or edit blocking or simply delaying the edits (until a
>> human can hand check them) of individual IPs/accounts from anywhere on
>> the internet that engage in certain broad patterns of activity.
>>
>> The important thing is to minimise the length/number of times that any
>> particular IP is able to engage in Grawp-like or other stereotypic
>> behaviour. While he/she/they would be able to soon find another IP, it
>> significantly mitigates the damage that can be done, and minimises the
>> cleanup.
>>
>>> X!
>>
>> --
>> -Ian Woollard
>>
>> We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
>> imperfect world would be much better.
>>
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> ]
> It seems hard to believe that Verizon would let such a rangeblock sit
> for long. I think the only message we need to get over to them is
> "dude, we're not kidding. We don't want to rangeblock your entire ISP,
> but this one person who has an internet account with you is causing us
> major headaches. Because of your dynamic IP adresses, we are unable to
> deal with it on an individual level. We are open to suggestions on how
> we can solve the problem, but if you are really not willing to help us
> out here, we simply have no other choise but to block every IP adress
> in your range from editing, as much as we'd hate to do that"
>
> I can't believe that bigwigs at Verizon would be willing to let that
> happen, the question is just how to get through to the right people
> that can do something about it.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.