Andrew Lih wrote:
Tony Sidaway <minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com>
wrote:
Maybe I didn't do enough RC patrol today, but
are you sure? WP seemed
pretty normal to me.
There was definitely more going on the last 36 hours. Obvious
vandalism, is easy to detect and rollback, but were coming at a
quicker rate. An anecdote and some stats:
Block log - Perhaps the best informal "vandal meter" we have, here are
some quick numbers from the last week, and a partial April 1 for the
list of blocked IPs and names. There is definitely a spike.
blocks-0322 4
blocks-0323 4
blocks-0324 7
blocks-0325 15
blocks-0326 14
blocks-0327 9
blocks-0328 15
blocks-0329 21
blocks-0330 6
blocks-0331 40
blocks-0401 62 (as of 21:30 EST)
If my attempt to reconstruct these statistics is correct, they were
taken from [[Special:Ipblocklist]] and not [[Special:Log/block]]. As a
result, they are highly misleading with respect to the number of blocks
performed on particular days.
[[Special:Ipblocklist]] contains a list of currently active blocks. Most
blocks for vandalism are only for 24 hours, sometimes longer for repeat
offenders. This means that the contents of [[Special:Ipblocklist]] will
be weighted heavily toward the most recent days, except for periods
where there is a surge of permanent blocks (e.g., a problem user
engaging in serial sockpuppetry, or a proxy-blocking binge).
Furthermore, [[Special:Ipblocklist]] also contains the autoblocks
triggered for IPs when a blocked user tries to edit, and these are
always for 24-hour periods.
On the other hand, [[Special:Log/block]] is the full log of all blocks
and unblocks (except for blocks set by the autoblocking feature).
Reviewing this does not show much of a spike in blocks for April 1 in my
judgment. If there is a slight increase, it might easily be explained
based on the recent problems with [[User:Martin2000]] over the
[[Bahá'u'lláh]] article, which has flooded the log with his sockpuppets
(every Nitram00xx user is one of these). The incident there has nothing
to do with April Fool's Day.
I agree that there was more frivolity on Wikipedia for April 1, and some
frivolity elsewhere may have spread here. But in terms of malicious
vandalism, I don't think the evidence indicates that the problem was
worse than any other day.
--Michael Snow