[WikiEN-l] "Doomsday" threat?

Wed Oct 11 18:32:10 UTC 2006

On 10/11/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/11/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 11/10/06, Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > Given that these mailing lists are available to be read by potential
> > > adversaries, it's probably not a good idea to speculate here about what
> > > those countermeasures might be...
> >
> >
> > One important point that escapes many is that when you try to explain
> > "it's a website the readers can edit", some people immediately go OH
> > NOEZ and list every obvious reason it can't possibly work and the
> > enterprise is provably doomed. Wikipedia cannot possibly work in
> > theory.
> >
> > Yet somehow it keeps working, pretty much. This is because every
> > single one of the doomsday scenarios has happened and keeps happening
> > and we've learnt to deal with them as part of the normal course of
> > events.
>
>
>
> We thought that about Usenet spam too, once.
>
> We lost that one.

That's because Usenet didn't have any good way of reacting quickly to
changing threats, or of undoing actions taken by users.  Wikipedia has
the advantages that any action can be undone faster than it can be
done, and that the whole system is centrally managed.  If all else
fails, the system can be put in read-only mode to give people time to
come up with a fix.

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]