Mailing List Archive

On Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 06:54:09PM -0700, Hunter Peress wrote:
> What do you think?

Stupid.

It says in big letters on main page of Polish Wikipedia that
registering is not needed. That's quite an important feature.

RE: the first response, I am disinclined to respond, however since I prefer to deal with this
"argument" (which it is not):


My solution does NOT disable non-registered users, it merely limits them to be able to do less
damage.

Sure, a registered user can do as much damage, but this system limits the power of one idiot, and
in this electronic age, all it takes is 1....person to crack dvd encrypting....person to release a
virus... Im not trying to be black and white here, I want to have a discussion, which my 2
previous emails lay the groundwork-for.


the simple fact IS that we are in continual presence of data decay.

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Hunter Peress wrote:

>Crap, crap, http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_contest was just vandalised.
>
>If it is ok with some people, I think I should code a feature so that non-registered users are not
>allowed to delete anymore than 50 characters in a row. (as you just have found out, i hacked
>around with difflib.php in order to get some ideas for the difflib.py that i worked on, so i could
>do this quickly).
>
>I believe 50 characters might even be too much.
>
>
>I think the same should go for adding?
>
>
>Next, we have to consider that if joe-IPaddress gets a warning that " you have tried to delete 50
>characters or more, this is not allowed unless you register" might start to game the system with a
>wget script.
>
>The simple fact is,however, that they could already do that before this security feature is
>implemented.
>
>HOWEVER, seeing this warning might incurr more aggressive behaviour on the whole.
>
>
>What do you think?
>
>
>
i think 50 might be too little. 50 could easily be a malformed sntence
of a POV sentence... maybe something like 80, or somewhere around there.
Just because 50 chars might easily be a small rewording, especially
someplace where html entities are present, since a single one of those
is 4 charcters... For en it might be ok, but I don't know if it would
work for the foreign wikis

Lightning

On Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 07:33:18PM -0700, Hunter Peress wrote:
> RE: the first response, I am disinclined to respond, however since I prefer to deal with this
> "argument" (which it is not):
>
>
> My solution does NOT disable non-registered users, it merely limits them to be able to do less
> damage.

You are limiting their ability to do positive things much more
than their ability to inflict damage.

There has never been any problem with anons.

There has never been any trouble with anons??

Thus, we should look at hard data, namely the ratio of banned IP's from registered users, and NOT.

To answer this question O(1) code must be written.


In irc just now, taw and I discussed the above. He even asks "maybe we should restrict editing of
even registered users".

Given the lack of solid information I was looking for, my brain cant work this fast at infereing
and simulating for this one task ;-). i need to let the ideas settle in while hopefully some good
commentary can be made.

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Hunter-
> Crap, crap, http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_contest was
> just vandalised.

> If it is ok with some people, I think I should code a feature so that
> non-registered users are not allowed to delete anymore than 50 characters in
> a row. (as you just have found out, i hacked around with difflib.php in
> order to get some ideas for the difflib.py that i worked on, so i could do
> this quickly).

This won't help at all, and will only impair normal use. Anons delete
substantial amounts of text all the time, perfectly legitimately, they
even help in blanking vandalism. Many anons are registered users who
cannot or do not want to sign in from where they are for whatever reason.

This really reminds me of Slashdot style lameness filters -- all they
accomplish is alienate users. If you want to reduce vandalism, don't make
it harder to cause -- make it easier to fix. That's the wiki way. With a
fast difflib, it should be possible to systematically view and flag all
anonymous edits for the past x hours, for example.

Regards,

Erik

Hunter Peress wrote:

>In irc just now, taw and I discussed the above. He even asks "maybe we should restrict editing of
>even registered users".
>
>

wooooahhhhh there woody. you know i didnt even liket he idea of the n
char max edit for anons. Primarily because its just not so "free". I
think editors should have the right to edit as anons and i dont see a
problem with that, thats the way wikis are and thats why we have
previous versions saved. Pages will be vadalized, and we will fix them
thats what the wiki is all about. I don't see editing restrictions
fitting well into the community. I don't like them myself. It just
completely violates the spirit of the wiki.


Lightning

on 7/27/03 8:29 AM, Lightning at lightning@chaos-productions.com wrote:

> Hunter Peress wrote:
>
>> In irc just now, taw and I discussed the above. He even asks "maybe we should
>> restrict editing of
>> even registered users".
>>
>>
>
> wooooahhhhh there woody. you know i didnt even liket he idea of the n
> char max edit for anons. Primarily because its just not so "free". I
> think editors should have the right to edit as anons and i dont see a
> problem with that, thats the way wikis are and thats why we have
> previous versions saved. Pages will be vadalized, and we will fix them
> thats what the wiki is all about. I don't see editing restrictions
> fitting well into the community. I don't like them myself. It just
> completely violates the spirit of the wiki.
>
>
> Lightning

Yet it might prevent the wholesale reverts some folks participate in. If
they had to actually go into the article and edit they might be less ham
handed. I remember one case where both new material and a link correction
had been put in and article and the reverter never caught on that by
reverting he was also reverting a link correction over and over.

Fred Bauder

http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org

On Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 10:26:17AM -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
> on 7/27/03 8:29 AM, Lightning at lightning@chaos-productions.com wrote:
>
> > Hunter Peress wrote:
> >
> >> In irc just now, taw and I discussed the above. He even asks "maybe we should
> >> restrict editing of
> >> even registered users".
> >>
>
> Yet it might prevent the wholesale reverts some folks participate in. If
> they had to actually go into the article and edit they might be less ham
> handed. I remember one case where both new material and a link correction
> had been put in and article and the reverter never caught on that by
> reverting he was also reverting a link correction over and over.

Hey, we could write protect the entire Wikipedia and thereby avoid any
future vandalism! Wouldn't this be just great? This would also stop
people who change years in articles to random numbers by changing only
one or two characters.

Come on, this restricting to 50 chars is not serious, is it? That's the
most unwiki proposal I've ever read. Highlight ''suspicious'' edits in
Recent Changes. Or perhaps not. Even ''unsuspicious'' changes might be
vandalism and be overlooked since they are not marked.

Regards,

JeLuF

Jens Frank wrote:

>Come on, this restricting to 50 chars is not serious, is it?
>
It would encourage vandals to be *very* creative.
Eg:
change all instances of "art" to "fart"
change all instances of "sum" to "bum"
change all instances of "parse" to .... you get the idea ;)

> That's the
>most unwiki proposal I've ever read.
>
yup.

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Hunter Peress wrote:

> Crap, crap, http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_contest was just vandalised.
>
> If it is ok with some people, I think I should code a feature so that non-registered users are not
> allowed to delete anymore than 50 characters in a row. (as you just have found out, i hacked
> around with difflib.php in order to get some ideas for the difflib.py that i worked on, so i could
> do this quickly).
>
> I believe 50 characters might even be too much.

Aahhhhh.... The worst proposal I have heared of changing the Wikicode. Some very
good contributors are non-registered users. Some others are registered, but have
browsers that tend to log them out regularly. It's happened to me that I found myself
logged out without realizing it, but I can just login again. However, if it happens
every session, I can very well imagine that one does not take the difficulty.

It will indeed stop people from removing large chunks of text at random, but it will
not stop them from writing "this sucks" or "and he was a gay pervert" into articles,
which are much more common and less likely to be caught.

> I think the same should go for adding?

Fair enough. You set the record, you break it. So now if I am an anonymous user and
I happen to know something about (fill in a subject), I am not allowed to write it,
because what I write might also have been a few lines of nonsense or some obscenities?
Not to mention what it does for interlanguage links...

> HOWEVER, seeing this warning might incurr more aggressive behaviour on the whole.
>
>
> What do you think?

I think that the ratio of stopped trolls to stopped decent users is too low to even
_consider_ this as an option.

Andre Engels

Erik Moeller wrote:
> If you want to reduce vandalism, don't make
> it harder to cause -- make it easier to fix. That's the wiki way.

Beautifully put.