[WikiEN-l] The Counter Vandalism Unit? Whaa?

Sat Feb 4 03:57:06 UTC 2006

On 2/3/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
>
> >What most of the people on this thread fail to recognize is that
> >creating anti-vandalism paramilitaries *encourages* vandalism.
> >
> That's just a ludicrous point of view - the vast majority of vandals
> I deal with neither know nor care about WP internal process. If they
> did, they would be able to introduce vandalism in much more subtle
> ways, for instance by stacking vandalistic edits behind legitimate
> changes by a sockpuppet, mixing vandalism in with a good edit, using
> plausible sounding edit summaries, etc. Instead, they tend to add
> the first thing that comes to mind, usually scatological.
>
> I get my data about vandals' habits from twice-daily reviews of a
> 19,000 item watchlist; where do you get your data from?
>
The lessons of history.

Okay, since you've got the data--not in terms of numbers, but in terms
of energy and resources, where is the most effort placed? Is it on the
random one-time scatological scribblers? Or the ones who come back
repeatedly? And fight the system?