Well, not all users have JavaScript. But, on the core of the proposal:
What threats? What users? How many, how serious? Have they been reported to Legal and Community Advocacy? These are the questions we tend to ask about this sort of issue. "Do we need to insert technical features to prevent it?" tends to come after a series of occurrences, and I'm only aware of two in the last six years or so. We shouldn't let one-offs dictate our UI direction and bandwidth load.
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Yuri Astrakhan yastrakhan@wikimedia.org wrote:
A few days ago, a well known Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Boris_Nemtsov near the Kremlin. This murder had a huge political resonance, and conspiracy theories flourished. Yet, one of the theories was due to Wikipedia's representation of time - anonymous users see change history in UTC. This confusion was so big, that several major publications, including Moskovkij Komsomolets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovskij_Komsomolets, published articles http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/02/28/vikipediya-zaranee-otchitalas-ob-ubiystve-nemcova-zapis-poyavilas-v-2140.html (in Russian) claiming that the wiki page proclaimed him dead before the assassination. The MK article was later updated with the explanation, but the damage has been done: a number of threats were made against the editors.
In light of the above, I feel we need to #1 Show a clear message at the top of all history-related pages for anonymous users that the time is in UTC until #2 #2 JavaScript should fix time on the fly for all users
Suggestions welcome.
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