[Wikipedia-l] Re: Attack against chinese wiki

[Tim Starling]

Ting Chen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> in the last two days the chinese wiki is under massive attack. The attacker
> uses a bot and various IP-adresses. We have problem to block all the
> adresses and we are at the moment also short on person to remove all the
> devastations. At the moment the attacker creates lots of new articles with
> the following content: (???????????????????????????????????) DeleteMeShizhao
> 
> 
> Can someone help?
> 
> Sorry this is really an emergency. Thanks.

I wanted to express my sincere apologies for not responding to this 
attack. I saw a message on the village pump but it was inspecific and I 
was busy, so I ignored it.

I wrote [[m:Vandalbot]] back in February, and promoted it on en, in the 
hopes that people would read it, and know what to do in this situation. 
Unfortunately the page hasn't been promoted on the non-English wikis as 
much as it should have been. I'll also update it in response to this 
latest attack. Here's the URL for convenience:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalbot

It's very important that all sysops read this page carefully. It's like 
first aid or fire response, you'll never think to read the manual when 
you're in the middle of dealing with an attack.

The important thing is that you MUST CONTACT A DEVELOPER, when a large 
scale attack is launched. This doesn't mean standing in the middle of 
nowhere and calling "developer!!" into the wind, you need to get their 
attention. You should probably contact a developer who will be willing 
and able to respond. Your best bet would probably be me. I'll update the 
vandalbot page on methods of contacting a developer.

BE SPECIFIC. Quote numbers. Wikipedia is attacked by bots constantly. 
"Someone is vandalising zh" won't get anyone's attention. A better 
report would be:

"Someone is creating 1 page per second and has been doing so for the 
past day, and we can't block them because they are using many different 
IP addresses. 3000 pages have been created."

What you have to understand is that it's much easier for me to delete 
3000 pages than it is for you to do it. I'm very sorry I didn't do so. 
In the future I'll watch the reports more closely.

-- Tim Starling