Anthere wrote:
When editors start to complain noisily over and over and over that the pornographic pictures of the english wikipedia are spilling over their project, then there is a problem. And I think it is normal that I report it, because I think it is understandable that people are upset and ask that a solution is brought.
Add that this is done by a bot and at high speed, and add that it is NOT easy to revert a redirect to another project, and you have the seed of a crisis boiling.
When porn images were linked many times in the english project, due to vandalism, it resulted in some solution being proposed : no direct linking allowed (granted, there was also the issue of the copyright).
When wrong images are uploaded at high speed by anonymous editor, the solution is to allow image upload only to log-in editors.
These two solutions do not allow to entirely prevent vandalism, but they allow to slow down the speed of it.
Now, we have several projects, such as the french, the dutch, the spanish ones, which are victims of vandalism spree by a bot, which redirect pages to the english pornography. It is a vandalism difficult to revert. It is time consuming. And it is very upsetting to editors.
The question is "is it okay that several editors spent several hours running to remove pornographic images from other editors talk page or their main page ?"; Is it the best way to use people time ? what value do you give to people time when they spent 1 hour cleaning up the mess of a 5mn bot ?
Dunno, but when editors leave me a spanish desperate message on my talk page, when I see calls on the french pump to go for deletion of the english image, I just think there IS a problem.
I am not sure the solution of this problem is to make a general call on all pedias vandalised to go vote for the image deletion.
The big risk when dealing with these problematic infantile behaviours is to have a solution that is worse than the problems. Some people like the feature of hiding edits by bots from Recent Changes, but that creates a drift away from the acceptance of a collective responsibility for dealing with vandalism.
Those of us who have been around for a while realize that this kind of vandalism is an unfortunate fact of life. Some of these people who complain the loudest also need to accept a degree of responsibility for dealing with the problem to whatever extent their technical access permits.
The other side of the technical solution approach is that most such solutions also restrict the activities of many more well-intentioned users. When there is garbage on a street of the community the fastest way to get rid of it is not by standing around and complaining to the government, but by the people themselves going out to clean the garbage themselves. If someone picks up the scrap of paper that he finds on the street and puts it into the trash that little problem is over. If, instead, he reports it to the authorities they will generate another 20 pieces of scrap paper to make sure that everyone is informed about the problem
Ec