[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted hand" status

Daniel Mayer maveric149 at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 22 03:29:46 UTC 2002


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Subject: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted hand" status
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 15:48:28 -0700
From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com

I'm sure many of you have noticed that recently there has been a growing
problem of people creating user accounts for the sole purpose of using
wikipedia's upload utility to place copyrighted and otherwise inappropriate
material on the server.

We might want to discuss further limiting the use of this utility
because it's abuse is beginning to be a maintenance issue for the syops and 
the presence of these bogus user accounts is also over-reporting the number of
true (as in contributing) users we have.

I know the "trusted hand" status is in the database already so it might be
easy to limit upload ability to "trusted hand" or greater status users. It
would also be nice to have this status granted automatically if say two
conditions are met: 1) a user account is at least 30 days old and 2) this
user has edited a certain number of articles (I would be liberal and set this
at 30, but I wouldn't mind having it set at up to 100).

And while we are at it we might also want to grant trusted hands the ability
to do things that currently only sysops can do -- like move pages or edit 
certain protected pages (those set to "is_trusted" perhaps? "is_sysop" would 
then only be used to protect certain established policy pages and for 
emergencies -- if a "trusted hand" went on a rampage it would be simple to 
just change the user's status). I wonder if a script could be written to 
change the status of all current users that have edited a certain number of 
articles? The sysops could always do this by hand if need be.

Oh, and if something like this were established we should encourage sysops to
manually promote new users that are able to understand the wikipedia concept 
and its policies early to "trusted hand" status before the 30day&30article 
requirement is met.

Just a thought....

maveric149

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