--- "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler(a)dwheeler.com> wrote:
Sadly, it appears that there are some hurtful
vandals out there
who are attacking the people trying to counter them.
For example,
User:Zoe has just posted that she's abandoning her
efforts to counter
vandals; see:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AZoe
which begins: "I'm tired of fighting, I'm tired of
arguing,
I'm tired of being called names."
The last straw seems to have been an edit by No-Fx
to Zoe's
user page, in which No-Fx made it appear that Zoe
was "into oral sex".
I don't know enough about this situation to know for
sure if this
is an example, but I am concerned about the
long-term dangers
if this starts a trend.
Attacks on users and sysops - particularly highly
dedicated ones -
are much more dangerous to the Wikipedia than
simple attacks on a few pages. If these kinds of
attacks cause
people to stop weeding out bad pages or vandals for
fear of retribution, the project is doomed.
Is there any way the software could be modified to
make it harder
for vandals to counter-attack the people who are
trying to
remove vandalism?
At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be
ONLY editable
by NAME? The "User_talk:" spaces need to be
editable in some way,
but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User:
space of someone;
it's not critical that that content be fixed, and
there's advantanges
to having some areas that are "precious" to each
user.
Here's a more controversial idea: perhaps some
information relating to deletion of pages and
banning of users
should be hidden from non-sysops. For example,
since "delete" can only be done by sysops, why not
just tell
non-sysops that a deletion occurred, but not WHICH
sysop did it?
By the same token, perhaps some discussion areas
should be
only readable/writeable by sysops, in particular a
discussion
area to discuss banning someone. Perhaps there
could be a way
where anyone (non-sysop) could suggest that someone
be banned,
without having their name revealed to non-sysops.
Since real deletes and banning can only be done by
sysops anyway,
and sysops are trusted, there's no reason this
information
MUST be public.
A related idea might be to modify the "talk" system
so that it's
more like a bulletin board, with threaded messages
and
a clear identification of who made it (click on
"reply" to reply
to that item, maybe in a threaded way). That way,
any message is
clearly
identified with its REAL author. A side-effect
would be that
the attribution would happen automatically (no more
forgetting ~~~~). That way, when people discuss
things, they
can't make it appear that someone else made an
outrageous/nasty
statement.
The goal here would be to prevent people from
attacking each other,
or at least limit its effectiveness.
Thoughts?
Yes.
I have three other suggestions.
Why not also just hiding deletion log to non-sysops
people?
After all, all they can do is look at the log. Not
look at the deleted pages, not even really get a sysop
to tell them what is in them. So does it have any
interest that they can see which pages were deleted at
all ? Perhaps, they don't need to know about it ?
Similarly, what about hiding the list of blocked users
from non-sysops users ? After all, since they can do
nothing to unban them, and since you suggest making it
impossible for them to participate in banning
discussion, perhaps does it have no sense for them
knowing about banning at all ?
Another suggestion : why not making the whole
wikipedia read only for non-sysop users ?
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