[Foundation-l] Semi-protection on April Fools

Wed Mar 29 04:43:09 UTC 2006

On 3/28/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to put in the open the notion of semi-protecting all
> Wikimedia projects [*] during April Fool's Day, that is, making them

Can you cite links showing an especially troublesome increase in
damaging edits last year?  I certainly don't recall seeing anything
terrible first hand.

Without more concrete information this just sounds like the same sort
of wild speculation about increased vandalism that we used to get when
slashdot linked to us that was later shown to be misplaced since being
linked by slashdot had no statistically significant impact on the
article vandalism rates in the vast majority of cases.

Obviously there will be some 'jokes'. But I don't see any reason to
expect the portion of them that would come from complete outsiders
would be especially above the noise floor of the typical vandalism
read...  I also don't see how if we were to agree that this was needed
why we shouldn't just turn it on every day.. but if thats the goal we
should state it outright.

Since this thread, thus far, has been devoid of any useful
measurments... I'll inject some now:

The below counts don't include deleted revisions, but most vandalism
on enwiki isn't deleted.
(times are GMT, which is why I included apr1/2)
Mar 24 2005 (thurs) - 26928 main namespace edits on enwiki
Mar 25 2005 (friday) - 28545 main namespace edits on enwiki
Mar 26 2005 (saturday) - 25140 main namespace edits on enwiki
Mar 31 2005 (thurs) - 28890 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 01 2005 (friday) - 27512 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 02 2005 (saturday) - 30539 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 07 2005 (thurs) - 30663 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 08 2005 (friday) - 32796 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 09 2005 (saturday) - 32120 main namespace edits on enwiki
Apr 15 2005 (friday) - 37182 main namespace edits on enwiki.
Apr 16 2005 (saturday) - 33344 main namespace edits on enwiki

Not really much room for an amazing influx of vandalism there...

How about edit summaries?
I'll post some of those in a bit, answers delayed due to mysql being stupid.