[Foundation-l] Abuse filter

[Chad]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Alex <mrzmanwiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bence Damokos wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 5:55 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Just so everyone is clear:
>>>
>>> 1) The abuse log is public.  Anyone, including completely anonymous
>>> IPs, can read the log.
>>>
>>> 2) The information in the log is either a) already publicly available
>>> by other means, or b) would have been made public had the edit been
>>> completed.  So abuse logging doesn't release any new information that
>>> wouldn't have been available had the edit been completed.  (Some of
>>> the information it does release, such as User ID number and time of
>>> email address confirmation, is extremely obscure though.  While
>>> "public" in the sense that it could be located by the public, some of
>>> the things in the log would be challenging to find otherwise.)
>>
>>
>> Is it a wild assumption on the part of an editor, that after he has been
>> warned for an "abuse" and not pursued it (by forcing a save if the "save"
>> button is available) to assume that his action was lost, and thus possibly
>> surprising to see it publicly logged?
>>
>> In my opinion pressing the preview button and then not saving is a similar
>> use case as being warned by the abuse filter and not saving -- you should
>> not expect the lost edit in either case to be publicly available. I think at
>> the least the abuse warning should make it clear that the action and <*x,y,z
>> data of the user> * were publicly logged.
>
> Except his assumption when clicking save, before ever seeing the abuse
> filter warning, was that his edit would be publicly viewable
> immediately. Unless the user was purposely intending to do something
> that he knew would be disallowed by the abuse filter, he was fully
> intending for whatever he wrote to be made public.
>
> --
> Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)
>
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Exactly. Which is why I fail to see an argument about privacy concerns. When
you press any submit button in Mediawiki for an action that is logged (be it a
page move, edit, deletion, user rights change), you do knowing full well that
your actions are going to be public. If your attempted action is blocked by the
filters, we now log that.

Now, I could see the argument for privacy if we started logging things that are
traditionally private (login/logout, password changes, preference changes, etc),
but that's not the case here.

-Chad