"William Allen Simpson" wrote AWB can be used in bot mode. But then, the user must be logged in and registered at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage#Bots under the section "Bots" (a fully protected page). And AWB cannot do page moves. --Adrian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ligulem

Steve Bennett wrote: At least on en:, administrators are primarily chosen based on activity and popularity (and often flamboyance), rather than technical competence or "trust". The selection mechanism has been proposed for revision numerous times, with extensive polling, but it is as it is. It would probably be better to return to the original Wales dictum, "This should be no big deal". Then, we would only know that administrators aren't new, and have some acculturation, but not "trust" in a security sense. There is not much of a viable mechanism for doing it. Heck, there's a recent en: administrator that lied during evaluation (saying s/he was no longer involved in userbox wars), and within hours of getting the flag began deleting userboxen (sometimes with provocative edit summaries), even where the specific userbox had survived TfD and CfD evaluation by the community. In one specific case of edit warring with fellow administrators, s/he expanded the User Christian userbox to be a page long, because they kept restoring it after s/he deleted it. If such an egregious case cannot be removed, then there's really not much hope for merely the careless and incompetent.

Steve Bennett wrote: So, we should allow unrestricted editing if you're logged out, but not if you're logged in? What's the point of restricting it for logged in users if you'll inconvenience legit editors, who may then leave, and vandals will just go right on vandalizing while logged out. Essjay -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/

Steve Bennett wrote: I think I have to agree with all of the above; it seems this delved off as a sub-thread of the original, discussing edit throttles rather than pagemoves. I certainly have to agree with questioning the benefit of any change at all; we're doing pretty well without any restrictions, and if a wiki is having a problem with pagemove vandalism, it shouldn't be that hard for a list full of techies (Disclaimer: I'm not one.) to come up with a pagemove-vandal-blocking-bot just like the one running on en.wiki. Essjay -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org/

On 7/3/06, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com> wrote: I wouldn't be keen if this applied to *all* users. I've done around 50 page moves in maybe 5 minutes - and I'm not a vandal. Sometimes you want to standardise the naming for a category. In my case, I was renaming all the French rivers from like "Garonne" to "Garonne River". Good detection and blocking tools, definitely. Imposing a random limit on everyone because of one or two very new users carrying out vandalism? Let's avoid it... Steve

William Allen Simpson wrote: This kind of sentiment (which appears to be widespread) assumes that everyone in the world has some sort of pressing need to do something useful for Wikipedia. You blindly assume that everyone will perform the same amount of work independent of how inconvenient it is or how long it will take, supposedly because they have some inherent urge to do that work and will not be held back by any obstruction. Has anyone ever thought that if something is less convenient or takes more time, that people are by logical consequence less likely to even do it at all? You made several unreasonable assumptions above. He only said he moved 50 pages within 5 minutes (= 6 seconds per move). This is completely reasonable and believable. You suddenly assert that the subsequent clean-up work must also fall within those 5 minutes. Heck, even asserting that this clean-up work was done at all is unreasonable in itself. Timwi

On 7/4/06, William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com> wrote: For what it's worth, I don't check for double redirects. I consider something them a bot could do a lot better. And they're not that harmful. (which isn't to say that fixing double redirects is to be discouraged, it's just a way of helping Wikipedia that I choose not to perform. I figure the benefits of standard naming outweigh the temporary downsides of the DRs. And I thoroughly reject any notion that one should not do beneficial thing A because one didn't also do beneficial thing B.) Ah, ok. So, I should probably only, like, make, what, one Wikipedia edit per day? What was the claim again, 50 pages in 5 minutes? Well, it turns out I only managed 5 per minute: # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) Arly (moved Arly to Arly River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) m Arly River (moved Arly to Arly River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) Armançon (moved Armançon to Armançon River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) m Armançon River (moved Armançon to Armançon River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) Arve (moved Arve to Arve River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) m Arve River (moved Arve to Arve River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) Ille (moved Ille to Ille River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) m Ille River (moved Ille to Ille River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) Huisne (moved Huisne to Huisne River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) (top) # 08:53, 29 May 2006 (hist) (diff) m Huisne River (moved Huisne to Huisne River: consistency (see discussion on Wikipedia:WikiProject French départements)) But hey, it's not a race :) Yay, I'm superhuman. And I wasn't even trying! Imagine if I trained a bit... Steve

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 08:28:33PM +0100, Rob Church wrote: And the award for Outstanding Effort in Understated Humor In A Mailing List Reply goes to... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

On 7/4/06, Ben Garney <beng(a)garagegames.com> wrote: I suppose the simple example would be: if the MediaWiki interface let me rename every single river to meet the "...River" naming convention, in one single second, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? The answer is, "good thing". One might then argue that giving such power to vandals is bad. But that wasn't the question: the question was whether *I* should have such power... Steve

Tim Starling wrote: I'm surprised (well, rather disappointed) that this even needs saying. It implies that most people here don't know what wiki is all about. Timwi

On 04/07/06, grok(a)resist.ca <grok(a)resist.ca> wrote: The truth is, no-one is still quite sure what a wiki engine should do, because no-one is still quite sure quite what a wiki is. Yes, there are definitions all over the place; but compare my opinion, Tim's, Brion's, etc. - and then compare those to Ward's. You'd find the details would vary in small but significant places. Rob Church

On 7/5/06, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote: So, has there ever been a serious attempt at implementing a "total user rollback", undoing every change for a specific user after a specific date, where there have been no subsequent changes to the article? Changes to make it easier for people to flag vandals would also be welcome. Currently, at en, it seems you can put a {{test}} warning on their user page, but that probably won't trigger further action. You can report it to AN/I, but I've never found that system terribly satisfactory from a user's point of view. Being able to flag edits - and by extension, editors - as vandalism would be great. Imagine a system where if 3 different editors have flagged edits by a given editor as "vandalism", it triggers some vandalism-reduction mechanism (like preventing changes being immediately public). Of course, the right to flag vandalism should be revokable to prevent its use in edit wars (and hence, only given, automatically, after some demonstration of commitment to the project...) Just an idea of how to extend the "make it easy to revert vandalism" idea without impingeing on good editors. Steve