[WikiEN-l] Re: Please let it be over...

Sat Apr 2 20:17:27 UTC 2005

Andrew Lih wrote:

>Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Maybe I didn't do enough RC patrol today, but are you sure?  WP seemed
>>pretty normal to me.  
>>    
>>
>There was definitely more going on the last 36 hours. Obvious
>vandalism, is easy to detect and rollback, but were coming at a
>quicker rate. An anecdote and some stats:
>
>Block log - Perhaps the best informal "vandal meter" we have, here are
>some quick numbers from the last week, and a partial April 1 for the
>list of blocked IPs and names. There is definitely a spike.
>
>blocks-0322 4
>blocks-0323 4
>blocks-0324 7
>blocks-0325 15
>blocks-0326 14
>blocks-0327 9
>blocks-0328 15
>blocks-0329 21
>blocks-0330 6
>blocks-0331 40
>blocks-0401 62 (as of 21:30 EST)
>  
>
If my attempt to reconstruct these statistics is correct, they were 
taken from [[Special:Ipblocklist]] and not [[Special:Log/block]]. As a 
result, they are highly misleading with respect to the number of blocks 
performed on particular days.

[[Special:Ipblocklist]] contains a list of currently active blocks. Most 
blocks for vandalism are only for 24 hours, sometimes longer for repeat 
offenders. This means that the contents of [[Special:Ipblocklist]] will 
be weighted heavily toward the most recent days, except for periods 
where there is a surge of permanent blocks (e.g., a problem user 
engaging in serial sockpuppetry, or a proxy-blocking binge). 
Furthermore, [[Special:Ipblocklist]] also contains the autoblocks 
triggered for IPs when a blocked user tries to edit, and these are 
always for 24-hour periods.

On the other hand, [[Special:Log/block]] is the full log of all blocks 
and unblocks (except for blocks set by the autoblocking feature). 
Reviewing this does not show much of a spike in blocks for April 1 in my 
judgment. If there is a slight increase, it might easily be explained 
based on the recent problems with [[User:Martin2000]] over the 
[[Bahá'u'lláh]] article, which has flooded the log with his sockpuppets 
(every Nitram00xx user is one of these). The incident there has nothing 
to do with April Fool's Day.

I agree that there was more frivolity on Wikipedia for April 1, and some 
frivolity elsewhere may have spread here. But in terms of malicious 
vandalism, I don't think the evidence indicates that the problem was 
worse than any other day.

--Michael Snow