...newly independent project was launched at Wikipedia.com on January 15, 2001....
It has come a long way since then. Search for anything these days and you see a wikipedia link. Its sad that I cant quote (and wisely so) it in any paper.
In a short period wikipedia managed to hold thousands and thousands of articles. click here [slashdot.org] for the/. article on 300,000 articles on wikipedia.
I still cant figure out how spammers have been kept at bay. Any idea?
I still cant figure out how spammers have been kept at bay. Any idea?
Basically the transaction costs for healing Wikipedia are less than those to harm it, over a reasonable period of time. I am an admin and if I see vandalism to an article, it takes about ten total clicks to check that editor has vandalized other articles and made no positive contributions, block the IP address or username, and rollback all of the vandalism by that user. It takes more clicks if they editd a lot of articles quickly, but
I'm currently taking a brief WikiVacation, but before GAFIAted, I had noticed a (just on the wrong side of the-)borderline troll who had discovered a new algorithm for hurting Wiki: He would go into a long article and make about twenty different small edits in a row, all over the article. Some of the edits would be neutral. Some would be helpful (typos corrected, etc.). Some would be bad, but at least slightly defensible. And the rest would be bad edits, ranging in severity from NPOV trolling up to borderline vandalism.
The problem, of course, is that doing a complete revert would throw out several babies with the bilgewater. I found myself doing a complete revert as a starting point, and then laboriously checking each individual edit to see if it was worth re-creating. All told, I ended up spending significantly more time and effort fixing things up than he did screwing around with them (on the other hand, the final product did contain his few positive edits, making it better than the original). I suppose that I could have simply done the revert and then forgotten about it, but that sort of thing would have left me open to complaints from him about how I cruelly reverted typo fixes, and so forth.
Fortunately, it's the type of attack that can only work on large articles, but I've seen a lot of vandals use its baby cousin, the "pee on one part of the article and then make a minor change to a different part" edit pair, and slip it by people who only diff the most recent of their edits.
if all his edits are in a row (or even possibblly if thier are other minor edits in between) then probablly the easiest way to deal with this is to view all his edits as one big dif and use those to decide what to reapplly don't try to diff one version at a time or you will be there ages
wikipedia everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
It has come a long way since then. Search for anything these days and you see a wikipedia link. Its sad that I cant quote (and wisely so) it in any paper.
In a short period wikipedia managed to hold thousands and thousands of articles. click here [slashdot.org] for the /. article on 300,000 articles on wikipedia.
I still cant figure out how spammers have been kept at bay. Any idea?
Re:wikipedia everywhere (Score:1)
Basically the transaction costs for healing Wikipedia are less than those to harm it, over a reasonable period of time. I am an admin and if I see vandalism to an article, it takes about ten total clicks to check that editor has vandalized other articles and made no positive contributions, block the IP address or username, and rollback all of the vandalism by that user. It takes more clicks if they editd a lot of articles quickly, but
Re:wikipedia everywhere (Score:3, Informative)
The problem, of course, is that doing a complete revert would throw out several babies with the bilgewater. I found myself doing a complete revert as a starting point, and then laboriously checking each individual edit to see if it was worth re-creating. All told, I ended up spending significantly more time and effort fixing things up than he did screwing around with them (on the other hand, the final product did contain his few positive edits, making it better than the original). I suppose that I could have simply done the revert and then forgotten about it, but that sort of thing would have left me open to complaints from him about how I cruelly reverted typo fixes, and so forth.
Fortunately, it's the type of attack that can only work on large articles, but I've seen a lot of vandals use its baby cousin, the "pee on one part of the article and then make a minor change to a different part" edit pair, and slip it by people who only diff the most recent of their edits.
Re:wikipedia everywhere (Score:1)