From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu>
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Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Over the weekend...
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 11:16:26 -0700
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FILETIME=[F4ED25F0:01C33DA0]
james duffy wrote in part:
Is there any program that can be written to keep
track of any new users
coming from those IPs and perhaps highlight them to a handful of senior
figures on wiki?
But that private eye program should not be
generally available. All users
should be treated with the presumption of innocence.
Watch out that we don't develop a corps (or cabal?) of "senior figures"
that keep tabs on suspected bad guys without others' knowing what's going
on.
We have [[meta:List of Michael's pseudonyms]] available to all;
any list of DW's pseudonyms should similarly be open to inspection.
To be sure, such lists should state up front that these are /suspected/.
(Michael's now does.)
-- Toby
The reason why I suggested this method is to avoid mass troll hysteria
breaking out as can happen, understandably given the behaviour of some
trolls, everyone was spending their time watching the IPs and all ganging up
on some new user, with each new user from those IPs being presumed guilty
until proven innocent.
What I was suggesting that a very small number of universally respected
wikipedians (eg, Jimbo, Brion and Mav) would have access to a program that
would give them the chance to spot suspicious activities by "new" users from
the range of IPs associated with DW or Michael. They could privately monitor
the situation and if they are seriously worried that the likes of DW is back
then raise the issue with everyone. In addition as now we would all be
keeping our eyes out. And if we all had suspicions we could raise the issue,
with they having the additional program to check out general wiki suspicions
about a user.
To call that some sort of elitist cabal is misleading. Everyone organisation
on the planet have people to keep an eye out for potential problems. After
all I and most wikipedians have no access to the programs that run wiki, nor
do I want it. But that does mean that those that do are some sort of
secretive elitist canal. Unless wiki has some sort of program, we give
trolls like DW the advantage, unless individual users do what I did and
spent hours and hours trawling through the suspicious user's contributions
to find patterns.
But having mass access to to such a program could cause more problems than
it would solve and risk creating witchhunts. Allowing one or two universally
accepted people a chance to /quietly/ check out the behaviour of a
mysterious user first would offer wiki a chance calmly to keep an eye out
for DW et al, in the process causing miminal disruption to wiki unless they
have clear evidence that /something is going on/ when the issue would be
raised with everyone.
JT
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