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

Fri Jan 7 18:20:22 UTC 2005

Another solution would be to temporarily put the article in a template 
and protect the page itself.
Most regular editors know how to edit a template, but not random vandals.

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales a écrit:
> 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 -----
> 