[WikiEN-l] threats and abuse from IP user

Sat Aug 23 01:00:28 UTC 2003

J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
> Look, don't get me wrong, I hope I'm misguided here, or being
> pessimistic, or something. Maybe the Wikipedia community will be
> able to withstand the losers.

We've survived worse than this before.  This isn't the first time,
either, that someone has threatened to bring in their friends.

One of the big secrets of Wikipedia is that it isn't really an
anarchy, it just looks that way.  There are rules, and we do enforce
them.  Fortunately, the rules are so mild and reasonable that most
people can passionately buy into them, because it only takes a little
bit of experience to see that NPOV actually works to get something
done that would otherwise be a partisan bashing party.

> First, some pages (e.g. Israel) will probably just have to permanently be
> protected. Well, maybe you need some sort of intermediate level of
> protection; e.g. only editable by someone who a) has an account, b) has
> it for a month, and c) has made a threshold level of accepted edits. But
> allowing anyone, even someone who's not logged in, to edit them is just
> going to turn into a constant edit war.

This is actually a pretty good idea.  I'm always in favor of finding
ways to turn our blunt instruments into 'softer' tools.  What I like
about your proposal here is that it *is* soft.  It could be used only
for certain pages marked as 'controversial', and that only *after*
they've become targetted for some kind of mass attack, or if an
ongoing flame war has lasted for months with no hope of resolution.

> Blocking IP addresses will work for a while to stop that, but if it doesn't
> maybe you'll have to disallow all edits from non-logged-in users, and maybe
> even go to a system were a new user is watched for a while to make sure they
> aren't a vandal.

I'm opposed to that, for as long as we can possibly stand it.

Here's what I think: openness has done something astounding here, and
I think your parallel to the Internet as a whole is a solid one.  But
we have to be really vigilant about not letting our fear of vandalism
turn into a lockdown or a turn towards closedness.  It really is true
that 99.5% of all people aren't jerks.

But, at the same time, I've always said that my goal, my dream, is a
free encyclopedia.  The 'experiment in anarchy' is secondary at best.
So as soon as vandals start to gain the upper hand, we'll do whatever
has to be done.

--Jimbo