[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia approaches its limits" - Technology Guardian

[Bod Notbod]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

>> I see a lot of these patrolling recent changes in Huggle. I look at
>> the user's other contribs and provided I can find just one in the same
>> day where he's blanked the page and written "SUCK MY ASS!!!" I'll
>> revert the numeric change and put "rv numerical change by bad faith
>> editor but editors may wish to double-check" as an edit summary.
>
> What you need to check here is that the editor in question isn't
> reverting vandalism by someone else. In other words, you need to check
> back further through the edit history to make sure you are reverting
> to the last clean version.

I do check what I'm reverting back to. The "editor in question" as I
say, is the "SUCK MY ASS!!!" guy usually. If I go back through the
article history I often see that there's a revert war, but usually the
vandal leaves no edit summary and the person reverting in good faith
does. So that's easy enough to spot. In short I tend to flick through
both the editor's contribs AND the article history and get a rounded
picture.

Steve Summit:

>Indeed.  And I've seen canny vandals instigate a deliberate chain
>of contradictory vandalism (perhaps involving sockpuppets) with
>the apparent intent of goading well-meaning but careless
>vandalism patrollers into doing precisely this.  (It's an
>annoyingly effective technique.)

Well, I confess that would probably fool me. Although would I be
correct in saying that in these cases it would either be a case where;
the first sock guise is an anon-IP and the other sock a named user; OR
both are named users? Which is to say it would HARDLY EVER be the case
that the two guises of the sockpuppet are editing using different
anon-IP numbers?

If that's the case, virtually everything that reaches the top of
Huggle's To Do list is anonymous-IPs... I hardly ever see an edit by a
named user. So provided I'm correct to say that two different anon-IP
addresses editing in (usually quick) succession are not going to be
one man and his sock, I shouldn't be falling into that pit.

I hope I've made that clear to follow. I have tried.