[Wikipedia-l] [Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article]

Fri Jan 7 15:02:58 UTC 2005

I am anonymizing this complaint, but I wanted to point it out to
people and to point out that complaints of this type are increasingly
common.  As we get more and more popular, vandalism of popular
articles, though corrected very very quickly, is also seen by more and
more people.

My technical proposal to deal with this (and I did not invent this
idea, I don't know who did, but it has been floating around) is a new
form of page semi-protection for extremely popular/important articles.

Basically, pages in this case will have a published form and a working
form.  The working form automatically becomes the published form
whenever one of two conditions is satisfied:

1.  X minutes has passed with no new edits
2.  A sysop forces publication immediately

'X' can be left variable, but for most cases I think 10 minutes would
suffice.  We might experiment with longer pauses for articles in cases
other than "popular + vandalism", for example as a new approach to
dealing with traditional edit wars in at least some cases.

For the user interface, when an article is in such a state, it looks
totally normal at the usual url.  But instead of 'edit this page' you
see 'live version'.  Click on that, and you're at the live version,
warts and all, and you can operate normally from there.

I think this solution is softer than our current solution, which is
just to protect the article.  George W. Bush was protected for 8 days
during the height of the election season because pranksters kept
putting goatse.cx images, etc., on the article.

This option would give us 10 minutes to deal with vandalism, and would
give us the opportunity to keep working on the article as well.

--Jimbo

p.s.  In case someone thinks the 'sysop forces publication
immediately' is somehow unfair, note that it is necessary to prevent a
denial of service attack once a bit of vandalism *does* slip through,
which is inevitable.  That is, if someone managed to get vandalism on
an important page, they could prevent others from removing it by
simply repeatedly touching the page within the 10 minute window.

The 'sysop force' means that responsible people can get a sensible
version back live.  We can make clear that sysops are only supposed to
do this in the case of vandalism, not just because they don't like the
way the article is written.

----- Forwarded message from heather hudak <heatherhudak at yahoo.com> -----

From: heather hudak <heatherhudak at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 06:52:46 -0800 (PST)
To: jwales at wikia.com
Subject: Note: Obscene language on Tsunami Article

Hi Jimmy,

I often visit Wikipedia for info. I find it reasonably
credible and it has a large amount of information.
This morning, I was looking for a quick bite about
Tsunamis. I was greeted by the used of the word
"f*ckers" etc., numerous times throughout the text all
the way to end of the article. It seems someone is
playing a bit of a nasty gag on your site. It also
takes away from the credibility Wikipedia has
achieved. The following is the link at which I found
this information: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake

This is disturbing to find at any site, about any
topic, but expecially a topic that encompasses so much
devastation.

While I am a young, reasonable business woman, I am
not necessarily offended by this, I just think it is
highly inappropriate and will likely deter me from
trusting Wikipedia information in the future. I use
the site very frequently (daily), and I can't imagine
that will continue. Prior to this, I was unaware that
Wikipedia received submissions from outside sources.
This situation encouraged me to learn more and trust
less. I hope you will look into ways to prevent this
sort of obscene language from penetrating the
information on your web site.

Sincerely,
Heather Hudak

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----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
"La nèfle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org