Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 January 5

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January 5

Article improvement and long-term semi-protection

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but since this question has been on my mind for a long time now, here it goes. Basically, is an article likely to improve under long-term semi-protection? Semi-protection means that only autoconfirmed or confirmed users can edit the page. These users tend to be experienced editors who are familiar with Wikipedia policies. However, this would leave out constructive contributions from anonymous users. I have seen many cases where an article was not updated for a long time until an anonymous editor edited it. So again, is an article likely to improve when semi-protected for a long period, or is there no correlation between semi-protection and article improvement? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 01:12, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

This question is probably better asked on another desk (perhaps Miscellaneous or the plain help desk). The impression I get is that articles are only semi-protected for a long time if they have been subject to incessant vandalism from IP (anonymous) users; vandalism that is frequent enough that the vandal fighters are having a hard time fixing it all. Astronaut (talk) 03:11, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

No, it is not likely to improve (at least not as much)… and to answer your next question, no, there’s nothing you can do about it, not here, not at Wikipedia. What’s even worse are things that are fully protected, forever. ¦ Reisio (talk) 03:46, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Just wanted to point out that anyone can still request changes to protected pages using templates {{Edit protected}} and {{Edit semi-protected}} – it's not that hard and reasonable edit requests should easily be approved. Even I as an experienced editor and bot operator sometimes need to use {{Edit protected}}. The bar for even temporary semi-protection is generally pretty high. I see some articles where 90% or more of edits are garbage that's reverted, and still they aren't protected. Reverting vandalism sometimes burns up a lot of good editor's time. But I think there may, unfortunately be a lower threshold for gaining protection on some "controversial" articles, and non-registered editors are discouraged from editing, not because they are vandals, but because they have "politically incorrect" points of view, you know, only politically correct sources are "reliable sources". One person's reliable source is another's propaganda outlet :( – Wbm1058 (talk) 17:05, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Approval aside, some pages are simply never visited by any person who can and will make an edit. It’s also patently at odds with arguably Wikipedia’s primary purpose, to be an encyclopedia that people can edit. ¦ Reisio (talk) 23:05, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

It's done kind of indiscriminately and even good edit requests are often ignored. If the article doesn't show a history of actual vandal attacks, try requesting unprotection at WP:RFPP. 67.119.3.248 (talk) 04:35, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

The OP might like to read Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Prohibit_anonymous_users_from_editing from the Village pump. The answer implied there is that anonymous edits are on the whole good, so protection is generally bad. IBE (talk) 18:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

@67.119.3.248: regarding It's done kind of indiscriminately and even good edit requests are often ignored., you make a good point. Knowing that administrative backlogs are a growing problem, I checked out Category:Wikipedia protected edit requests. I can't work on that but I can help with Category:Wikipedia semi-protected edit requests, and I did so for the first time today. Compared with other backlogs, this one doesn't look too bad. If you believe request is unfairly "ignored", you might try getting a second opinion from a different editor. – Wbm1058 (talk) 22:04, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Thinking of a film

I'm trying to remember the name of a film. The only details I remember about it is that a person can purify himself by stepping through the doors of a church. Can anyone help me figure it out? -- Tohler (talk) 01:47, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

This is surely the wrong desk (see WP:RD/E), but Dogma comes immediately to mind. --Tardis (talk) 02:22, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Oops! My apologies. I thought I was in the Entertainment desk. Thank you for answering any way; that is the film I was thinking of! -- Tohler (talk) 03:28, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Configuring Samba

I'm trying to set up a shared directory on Linux using Samba, so that my Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) PCs can see it. The advice I have is to make sure Samba is configured to use the same Workgroup as my Windows PCs, and to use smbpasswd -a <user> to configure a username which is exactly the same as my Windows username. Unfortunately, smbpasswd reports "Cannot locate Unix account for 'Fred'". Such a username doesn't exist, but if I try to add one with useradd Fred, I am told "invalid user name 'Fred'". Is this error because there is already a user 'fred' (with all lowercase)? Is this really a hopeless effort because my Windows and Linux usernames differ only by capitalization? Astronaut (talk) 02:58, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

What samba version are you using and do you have libpam-smbpass installed? Because if you do, libpam I think will automatically synchronize your linux username password with the sambapasswd. But I don't know how it's configured on your system. Look at this for more info on that [1].

Usernames are not case sensitive for samba (I'm 90% sure of this... but someone correct me if I'm wrong). Actually that's slightly misleading because while I think that SMB doesn't care, your linux system does... samba actually tries the username first as it's submitted, then in all lowercase, then with only the first letter capitalized. So FrEd would be tried as FrEd, fred, and Fred. You may also want to look at "username level" option in the smb.conf man page. Shadowjams (talk) 03:44, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Or the username map feature, which allows you to manually define arbitrary mappings between SMB and unix user names. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 15:54, 5 January 2013 (UTC)