On 29/12/2008, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:
So why are you wasting the ISPs time and the
police's time when the best of
the passive technology routes have not been explored? Using machine learning
*you pit the vandals against themselves. *Every time they perform a
particular kind of vandalism, it can never be performed again because the
bot will recognize it.
There's an infinite number of ways to vandalise the wikipedia, and, in
practice, not all forms of vandalism can be detected by any known
design of bot, or humans with complete reliability for that matter.
I know something of machine learning myself, although I am not an
expert. In principle it can learn anything, in practice, there are
many problems and if you have *any* other way to do something, you're
normally better off.
Vandalism/spam is a difficult enough problem that *any* method should
be investigated and if it is found to be effective, applied, not
simply technological ones. But we need to stick to proportionality- we
should never use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Jarlaxle is only 19; as I understand it the human brain does not fully
mature until maybe 25. Unless he's actually mentally ill (which is by
no means inconceivable) he is likely to stop of his own accord at some
point.
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.