Talk:Rizon

Edit war of ~Sept 19, 2007

Please stop and explain why you believe the DDOS section should be removed. As it stands, that is the article's sole claim to WP:NOTE, so please also provide some other sources to give us a reason why the wiki should continue to host the article if the section were stricken. Is there anything at all in it that is factually inaccurate? MrZaius^talk 07:17, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I just added a year. Tyciol (talk) 14:19, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Unnecessary Cleanup Templates

In response to: "not a single source left after recent unexplained deletions that actually mentions Rizon, but the accuracy and relevance of those was questioned by good-faith deletion of that text. see history" edit summary from Mrzaius

I've again removed the {{Notability}} template as I do not feel it is appropriate in this situation. I had already checked the article's edit history before I replaced the {{Notability}} template with a {{Refimprove}} template. What I see in the edit history is a prolonged edit war/conflict over the DDoS section. I considered adding {{Importance}} but after going over the article and edit history I did not feel it was needed. The {{Refimprove}} template makes it clear this article is lacking references, which going by the edit summary message left above, seems to be the main concern.

Rizon is however clearly a notable topic. This was previously addressed with an AfD on December 1, 2008. This IRC network also has a non-trivial number of users and channels. While the number of users and channels shouldn't by itself be the sole factor in deciding "notability" (there are much smaller networks with far fewer users and channels that are still "notable"), this still cannot be overlooked.

This article is most likely a candidate for {{Expand}}, but I do not feel adding it would do much other than crowd the article lead as most people ignore these templates anyway.

--Tothwolf (talk) 00:32, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

If you look at other IRC AfDs, we've never hammered out any sort of notability guideline based on activity and the use of such statistics would, just as they would on an article about a website, constitute WP:OR. More importantly, the sources in the DDOS section were the sole sources that actually mentioned Rizon. If they are for some reason inappropriate here (and I still have yet to here reason one as to why they are), then the topic probably doesn't meet the most basic tenant of the general notability guideline. Without multiple independent and reliable sources, this article would have been deleted and, if they cannot be restored for a valid reason, the article may yet be. The Notability tag was pertinent. MrZaius^talk 04:15, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm painfully aware of what has happened with the IRC-related articles as a whole. This is the reason I've returned to Wikipedia proper after being absent for many years. A few of the network articles were even deleted improperly (such as what happened with AbleNET where it was templated with {{prod}} after it went through an AfD, etc) and others had AfD debates where only 2 or so people participated. At least 2 articles that I know of (and a 3rd was attempted but failed) were deleted after AfDs were started and directed in retaliation by individuals who were angry that their own IRC-article had been deleted (I don't want to link to these until I have time to sort them out). I have a large list of redlink IRC articles I'm currently sorting out, some of which came from the various navigation footers when I redesigned and rewrote them.
I'm aware that there isn't a defacto way to establish WP:N for IRC-related articles. Due to the nature of IRC topics in general, it is extremely difficult to source many IRC topics without making use of "primary sources". I actually just went though this with an AfD and DRV with one IRC article. This is likely something that should be addressed in a future guideline document but for now I'm trying to sort out and clean up what's left of these articles.
Even though this article needs to be expanded and properly sourced, I still don't think we need the {{Notability}} template as {{Refimprove}} covers the fact that it still needs to have additional references added.
As for the DDoS section, I'd be wary of it because if the information turned out to be bogus, you could end up with trouble because it touches on WP:BLP.
--Tothwolf (talk) 08:03, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

To your final point, that's why I've temporarily let the point drop pending an eventual response from the anon editors that keep removing it. Per your other, it is extremely difficult to source many IRC topics without making use of "primary sources" - That hardly warrants lowering the bar for notability. This is an encyclopedia, not a dmoz directory of IRC networks. There shouldn't be a separate guideline for IRC networks, given how few there are and the relative lack of quality and attention to detail and encyclopedic tone of the non-notable pieces. There were very good reasons for the vast majority of the deletions, and this article likely warrants deletion without new sources as not a single outstanding reliable source actually references the network. MrZaius^talk 16:52, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

<insert random break here>

I'll take a closer look at the DDoS material in the next few days when I have a free moment and see what it looks like from a WP:BLP view.

"That hardly warrants lowering the bar for notability."

That is not what I said nor did I propose that. To paraphrase, I said there currently is no defacto way to establish WP:N for IRC-related articles and that is likely something that should be addressed in a future guideline document. Wikipedia has had the same sort of problem in the past for other subjects and the way it's corrected is to document the problems and attempt to write guidelines that address them. Case in point: articles about radio and television stations.

The problem is this isn't just about IRC networks, this has been happening to all IRC-related topics, including IRC-related software. The software issue can sometimes be addressed with other guidelines (specifically, software that is included with an OS distribution such as one of the Linux of FreeBSD distributions had been deemed to be notable) but that does not help address problems other articles have had.

"This is an encyclopedia, not a dmoz directory of IRC networks."

Indeed. However Wikipedia currently isn't giving equal weight to the topic and this is something that must somehow be addressed and corrected. Currently, Wikipedia's coverage of IRC topics and specifically the IRC networks is skewed in favor of only a handful of the extremely large networks. This is a problem because this tends to mislead the average reader who is unfamiliar with the wider topic of IRC into believing that all IRC networks are massive and have 10s of thousands of users. There are actually 1000s of IRC networks, not just a few, but Wikipedia's coverage of the topic would indeed lead one to believe there are only a handful of IRC networks.

Wikipedia has previously had articles covering the majority of the top 25 and a good portion of the top 50. See IRC Networks - Top 100. There have occasionally been articles covering "networks" with only a handful of users on a single server and in my mind those probably did not deserve their own article. Some of those extremely small "networks" likely deserve a brief mention in a larger IRC network related article though.

The problem with many of these articles needing to be better written and needing better sources is an editorial issue, not something that should be addressed by an administrative option such as deletion. Rizon specifically is probably one of the better known IRC networks and is one of the easier networks to source, regardless of whether or not someone likes what they are best known for (anime discussion and fansubbing in general).

Thanks for keeping me on my toes ;)

--Tothwolf (talk) 22:22, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Now that you've reintroduced a handful of sources that explicitly refer to Rizon and its staff (where none but the official site and bot-collected statistics were present before), the notability burden is met. Seems good enough for me, until more sources become available. MrZaius^talk 16:26, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Only a handful? It took almost two days to source and rewrite ;)
I did see why someone kept removing that section, but it meets WP:V and if it gets removed again we should request indefinite semi-protection for this article. I've also located 5 book references where Rizon is mentioned in relation to file trading so I'll try to work those in once I'm able to read through the material. These books also mention a number of other IRC networks so I'll probably be able to reuse some of the citations in the other articles as I rework them as well. Tothwolf (talk) 01:22, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

"DDoS attacks against rival networks" section

Bringing this old topic back up once more, I'd like to ask: how relevant is this section to the Rizon network? Although the botnet was manned by the founder of Rizon, Jason Micheal Downey, it was not actually supported by Rizon itself (which was run by an executive board, not just by Jason). At this time, Jason hasn't been an active executive board member for years.

Maybe the bulk of this content would be better placed on a page about Jason Michael Downey (like many of the other persons charged in Operation: Bot Roast) with a link to that page from the Rizon page.

Disclaimer: I am a staff member on Rizon. However, I believe this is a valid point about the article from a WP:NPOV.

Thoughts?

Darius Jahandarie (talk) 17:38, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

This is many years removed now, and I don't have any secondary sources for this, nor any verifiable sources about the but I did monitor some traffic from at least one zombie botnet that had Nessun and at least one other rizon higher-up in the c&c channel. Whether this constitutes action by/on-behalf-of/blessed-by The Organization is always a difficult thing to determine (e.g. US finance scandals, fraud schemes, etc). My personal opinion is that the network directly benefited in usercounts from the actions, but *shrug*. 64.245.3.212 (talk) 19:48, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

I can pretty much assure you that there's nothing like that going on anymore. Most staffers don't use their real names, so it's not easy to verify this, but the large majority of us actually do security work ourselves and try to shut down such botnets, these days. It's just really painful having something like this on the Wikipedia article when it was really the action of one person who is no longer involved with the project. Darius Jahandarie (talk) 14:54, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Funding

How is Rizon funded? Benjamin (talk) 00:31, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

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