[WikiEN-l] Dealing with AOL over vandalism

Sat Aug 30 23:45:09 UTC 2003

>Mark wrote
>While I doubt that this idea will go anywhere, I figured I'd weigh in 
>against it anyway.
>
>First of all, the whole idea is somewhat ridiculous.  AOL is the single 
>largest ISP in the United States, providing internet access to millions of 
>people, including quite a few of our better contributors.  Blocking it 
>would be incredibly counter-productive, and do far more damage than Michael 
>could possibly do.  Furthermore, it is unlikely to receive *any* even 
>remotely good publicity, regardless of what publicity blitz you put on.  It 
>will receive good publicity on slashdot, in NANAE, and other similar 
>internet-zealot locations, but universally bad press everywhere.

You are joking!!! AOL is extremely unpopular among the media, who see it as 
an arrogant and incompetent organisation. I mentioned out problems to a 
friend of mine who works in the New York Times some weeks ago and asked him 
whether the media would be interested in a negative story critical of AOL. 
His response was 'you betcha. AOL is the sort of arrogant big name we are 
all just waiting to take a pot shot at.'  Anyone attacking AOL would be 
guaranteed media interest and follow up stories based on contacts with other 
people in the internet business who are furious with AOL for various reasons 
but because they are tiny don't want to draw attention to themselves. Wiki 
isn't; it is one of the fastest growing sites on the net. AOL needs 
criticism from something like wiki like a hole in the head. It spends 
millions every year in PR to create the image of a 'good' service provider. 
The last thing it would want is to get attacked by a rapidly growing and 
highly regarded encyclopædia for facilitating vandalism.

Wikipedia will
>essentially be painted as an elitist internet-zealot organization that 
>doesn't allow common folk in, while we'd like to be painted as a bit more 
>open than that.

No. It would be painted as a high quality information source accusing an 
organisation already privately criticised as putting money before protecting 
web-sites, of recklessness and facilitating vandalism. And the media /love/ 
taking pot-shots at high profile people or organisations, like Microsoft. 
politicians, religions, big business, etc. I don't think you grasp /how/ the 
media works, Mark, or how important good publicity is to organisations like 
AOL, how much they pay to get it, how damaging bad publicity to them can be, 
and the lengths they will go to to avoid it.
>
>In addition, it's completely unnecessary.

Lets see. One vandal consistently vandalised every music sites he could get 
his hands on. Now he has spent two months vandalising user pages. His latest 
game is to delete 7 months of deaths from the [[Recent deaths]] page and to 
add in the deaths of users he clashes with onto the page, calling them 
''bastards''. That is /one/ user. How many such people do you think it would 
take to do far more damage, on such a scale as to distract serious users 
from doing serious work and drive away people? This one user has already 
driven away people. As wiki gets bigger, the certainty is that more assholes 
like Michael will join in the 'game'.

Even if we were to need a
>technical block of sorts (which IMO would require far more vandalism than 
>Michael has caused so far to justify), it should be done as minimally as 
>possible.  Using something heavy-handed like blocking all AOL IPs from 
>editing is certainly not minimal.  A first step I *might* possibly support 
>*if* it were a huge problem and all other avenues were exhausted

What avenues are left, given that this user can hide behind AOL's lax 
controls and vandalise articles at will. I don't want to spent my days on 
wiki reverting everything he does and protecting user pages when the user 
isn't on and Michael is targeting them /again/.

>would be to allow sysops to ban logged-in users if they are currently on an 
>AOL IP (then Michael could simply be banned by any sysop each time he pops 
>up by clicking the "ban" button).  However, even this I'd prefer not to 
>have, given that other solutions are possible (my preferred so far being 
>extending rollback to support rolling back page moves).
>
I think you are seriously underestimating the problems Michael is causing, 
the scale of the problems that additional Michaels could cause or the 
vulnerability of AOL to criticism. And you grossly misunderstand how the 
media would cover criticism of AOL.

JT

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