[WikiEN-l] Playing zap (Was the bad BLP)

[Tony Sidaway]

2008/5/2 michael west <michawest at gmail.com>:
>
>  Can I mess about with an American icon under a proxy for 3 days? I wouldn't
>  even want to try.

I'm not exactly a technophobe, having written my first computer
program while still at school, in 1973, and made my living exclusively
from programming computers in three decades.  I have become familiar
with, then expert in, software technologies devised by people who were
not even born when I left school, so I'm no stick-in-the-mud.

I do have a problem with the above posting, however, and that problem
is that it was so full of jargon that I could not really understand
it.  The quoted section is only a small part of the problem.  What, in
this context, is "an American icon"?  One of those little smudgy
pictures of a flag as sometimes used on Wikipedia, perhaps?  Or a
famous American like Madonna?  What is the meaning of "proxy" in this
context?  I suppose the most likely candidate here is an anonymizing
http proxy, a program that attempts to conceal the origin of your
online requests.

The trouble is, neither of the interpretations available from the
above analysis makes any sense.  Moreover the complaint about RC
(Recent Changes patrol, perhaps?) was incomprehensible.  "Flagged
rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse."  Eh?

Moreover the complaint about Google caching appears to be
technologically illiterate: the content of the Google cache has
absolutely no effect on the content of Wikipedia pages.  We should no
more worry about it that we should worry about some drunk's
interpretation of a misheard conversation in a pub.

Recent changes is a necessary job, and a pretty simple one that has
become more automated over the past three years.  It is necessary to
be clear about what it involves, however: examining edits and removing
bad ones.  Failing to recognise that stark simplicity can lead, and
appears to have led here, to the adoption of obscure and confusing
jargon, the invention of problems that either don't exist or are
outside the purview of a website by any reasonable definition, and
resulting time wasted talking about non-problems.