On 03/05/2008, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/2 michael west michawest@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.
Ooops sorry Tony, "Flagged rollback will always miss out cross-ip abuse." was an attempt at explaining the problem where several edits have been made by unregistered/not logged in editors who have vandalised pages and the editor monitoring recent changes has used their automated rollback rights to restore another vandal edit.
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an attempt to explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point to it being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google cache may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
This thread and the "Another example of a bad biographical article" thread will hopefully become redundant when flagged/sighted revisions transform the copy that readers see. I do also appreciate that attempts to explain some routines in Wikipedia do often use phrases completely out of context, though surely I am not the only one guilty.
mike