[Wikipedia-l] Re: Attack against chinese wiki

[Andrew Smith]

From: "Tim Starling"

> 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
>
......
>
> 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

Don't be so hard on yourself Tim, you can't be everywhere all the time!

Although I'm sure this hasn't been a pleasent experience for the Chinese
Wikipedians we can draw some positives from it, there's technical
discussions about proxy scanners (whatever they are) and increased awareness
of the importance of pages like the above, which I'm sure will both lead to
a better response in a few months time if a vandal attacks (say) the
Portugese Wikipedia. I think we all need to remember that we are, in a way,
conducting original research: given a few hundred projects over half a
million pages in 50+ languages, what is the best response to concerted
technical vandalism? Six months ago we could have guessed, now we can make
informed guesses, perhaps in a year's time we'll have a pretty water tight
solution.


Thanks for all the work you do Tim, your efforts are seriously appreciated
and I'd find it hard to believe that anyone would want to lay any blame at
your door for what's been happening over at zh.

Andrew (Ams80)