[Foundation-l] English Wikipedia ethnocentric policy affects other communities

Fri Dec 22 01:10:01 UTC 2006

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George Herbert wrote:
> Dedicated vandals are banking sockpuppet accounts, creating them constantly
> and doing "good" edits from them to get them to be known user IDs, getting
> past the "new user" time period and minimum edit counts to be taken
> seriously, etc.  The long-term vandal who's been placing penis pictures on
> the featured article of the day, for example, has been using sockpuppet
> accounts that they started accumulating well before they launched their
> first known attack, if I understand it correctly.
> 
> Someone could easily use any of the other wikis to do that with under SUL,
> and nobody would know there was a problem until the account showed up in
> enwiki and started getting the similar-looking user in trouble.

An account registered off of enwiki wouldn't do them any good on enwiki
until they started *using* it on enwiki, at which point it'll appear for
the heuristics the same as if they'd registered it on enwiki at that time.

> Just implimenting SUL as currently planned does not help us, at all, with
> this problem, and does introduce a head-on collision between one of the
> preventive mechanisms on enwiki and how SUL works in the first place.

It neither helps nor hinders. No such collision exists.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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