Wikipedia: VANDALISM IN PROGRESS/Talk

Showing revision 11

Inevitably I suspect someone will complain that this page will only encourage trolls. However this page has now existed for several days, and I quite like it. It's attention getting, and will quickly recruit a number of people to stem the damage.

Even the most diehard troll will give up fairly quickly when their vandalism gets erased by the combined effort of 30+ people.

Actually, I'm the person who orignally objected to your naughty person list, and I started this page. :) If everyone starts using this page, I suspect most vandalism will have a total existance time of about 30 seconds. --STG

Actually I think they both work - this page won't catch the "insidious" miscreants, the ones who edit only occasionally to try and promote a particlar viewpoint. My page is not realy useful for large-scale vandalism.

Agreed. --STG

There is also opposite scenario available: Even the most diehard wikipedians will give up fairly quickly when a single perlscript will start vandaling. --Taw

OK - Taw, I agree that this page does not solve that problem. So what do we do then? - MMGB

Give short-term-IP-ban (like 30 minutes) rights to enough people, so that at least one of them is usually on wikipedia. Or rights of turning wikipedia into [War Mode]? for a short time (this will also work against distributed vandalism attack). During war mode all changes would be enqueued onto [War Mode/Proposed Changes Queue]? and could be accepted only by selected users. Of course this shouldn't be done unless somebody really attacks us with a perl script. Too much paranoia isn't really good. --Taw

Move this to http://meta.wikipedia.com and then we'd be talking. If my blatherings shouldn't fill up the Recent Changes page, neither should this. It belongs in a separate namespace from the main encyclopedia (thus if not meta, then at least a subpage under Wikipedia. The ALL CAPS TITLE is a little much, too. --TheCunctator

I disagree - the purpose of this page is to catch everyone's attention. Hence it belongs on Recent Changes (where we spend a lot more time than on Meta), and needs the ALL CAPS, to stand out. - MMGB

You're missing the point, C. The page isn't commentary, it's a utility to bring attention to a sustained vandalism attack. The ALL CAPS TITLE fits perfectly with this purpose, and if I could, I'd make the title red too. ;-) --STG

Stephen, I'm not missing the point. Meta is for pages about Wikipedia. It's what meta means. (I know that some people are restricting it to "unofficial" meta-pages.) This is a meta-page.

I understand why you used the ALL CAPS TITLE, but I think that you should be more polite to people who don't care about this; meta was created so that people who don't want to see discussion on the Recent Changes page don't have to; similarly, the VANDALISM IN PROGRESS announcement, whether you consider it "commentary" or "utility", shouldn't be so obtrusive.

Note: I'm not complaining about the idea; I just think it doesn't have to be so loud to work; and if it doesn't have to be, then it shouldn't be. Please don't tell me that I'm missing the point. --TheCunctator

I like Taw's idea of a short-term-IP-ban facility. There should probably be some restriction to prevent a person using it more than once in any 24-hour period (say), just in case someone decided to misuse it. I was intending to write an anti-vandalism perl script, but never got around to doing it. The idea would be that as soon as a vandal is spotted, the script could be run to undo all his vandalism. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 2

Sounds excellent - who's got the coding chops to pull it off? (BTW this discussion about the Short-term ban facility SHOULD be moved to Meta) - MMGB

Because we're changing software anyway, such thing should be coded into PHPWiki. Try contacting Magnus Manske. --Taw

PHPWiki, I believe, is the name of a different PHP-based Wiki script. This script doesn't really have any name other than "Wikipedia PHP script" or "Magnus Manske's PHP script". --TheCunctator