Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-03-14
Page moves restricted as part of fight against vandalism
In an attempt to reduce problems with vandalism, the MediaWiki developers activated a feature last week to restrict new user accounts from performing page moves.
The latest discussion of this idea started on 19 February, in response to rising frustration over the vandal generally known as Willy on Wheels. Willy on Wheels has for several months caused problems by moving a large number of pages to nonsense titles, which takes significantly more time to clean up than normal vandalism. It is believed that he sets up a number of page moves using a tabbed browser, then performs them all rapidly before any kind of response is possible.
The first major problem with page moves came last year, when Wik adopted this tactic as part of his vandalbot attack. This briefly resulted in page moves being shut down entirely for non-administrators. This time, discussion focused on setting various technical limitations on page moves that could prevent the vandalism, such as requiring a minimum edit count or limiting the frequency of page moves.
David Gerard reported on 6 March that he had asked developer Tim Starling in an IRC conversation about the existence of a feature to restrict page moves. Starling, recently returned to activity after taking a break from Wikipedia (see archived story), said that the necessary code had been written last year to deal with the vandalbot, but that the feature was now turned off.
Most of those involved in the discussion supported implementing some kind of restriction, at least temporarily. Noel said, "We need to turn this on until we get something better." A simpler method to undo page moves will hopefully be incorporated in the upcoming release of MediaWiki 1.5.
Last Monday, 7 March, developer Brion Vibber indicated that the feature had been turned on, thus preventing the newest one percent of user accounts from performing page moves. According to Vibber, the feature has already been active on the German Wikipedia for a while. As written, the code restricts moves based on the time of account creation, not the number of edits made by the account.
Unfortunately, the restriction of page moves by new accounts failed to deter this kind of vandalism for the moment. Willy on Wheels apparently had several existing accounts in reserve, and used these to unleash a new attack of page move vandalism on Friday. However, if his supply of old accounts is exhausted, the developers may be able to get improved tools for dealing with page moves ready by the time any newly created accounts are able to attack.
Suspicion of banned user's return prompts block war until Jimbo steps in
Another block war resulted in an arbitration request last week, after a user was blocked on a disputed theory that the account was a reincarnation of a permanently banned user. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales settled the issue by banning the account under his authority as the final source of appeal in disputes, but the appropriateness of this intervention was also a matter of debate.
Early allegations of "stalking" and username issues
The incident began with an account named The Recycling Troll (TRT), which was created on 21 September 2004, and had been used sporadically to make small flurries of contributions roughly once every few weeks from that date until late December. Two months later, on the last day of February, TRT returned and began a distinctive editing pattern. Each day, TRT would go to articles last edited by Wikipedia administrator RickK and make minor changes--normally grammatical adjustments or wikilinking existing words and phrases. By the first week of March, RickK had begun to complain that such behavior constituted a form of stalking. When he confronted TRT with this accusation, TRT's response was that RickK was merely a user whose edits he wanted to "check" -- TRT characterized his behavior as "collaborative", but RickK disagreed.
On the 3rd of March, events began to escalate, as Wile E. Heresiarch blocked TRT indefinitely on the grounds that TRT's username violated Wikipedia policy by using the word "troll". The Wikipedia community has long been divided over whether the word "troll" in a username is grounds for a ban, and the Arbitration Committee declined to rule in a previous case that such a name alone could justify a ban. Several editors raised this concern on the Administrators' noticeboard, and after some discussion, the block was lifted by Michael Snow. Snowspinner then applied a 24 hour ban to TRT for "disruptive editing": after this block expired, TRT returned to his editing pattern of making minor edits to articles recently touched by RickK.
Yet another blocking/unblocking war, plus the possibility of a reincarnation
On the 9th of March, TRT again was blocked by Snowspinner, this time for 7 days, on the grounds that he was stalking RickK and therefore being disruptive. Mark Richards lifted this block soon thereafter, on the grounds that the block was not within policy. Discussions began at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Snowspinner and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents concerning the appropriateness of the block on TRT.
A number of users joined Richards in criticizing the block as a unilateral action not supported by community consensus or a decision of the Arbitration Committee. Another group of Wikipedians defended the block as an appropriate exercise of common sense, and contended that such judgment calls are a part of what administrators are needed for at Wikipedia.
Early in this discussion, arbitrator David Gerard presented another argument in support of the block. Convinced that TRT was a reincarnation of previously banned user 24/142.177.etc/EntmootsOfTrolls (142 for short), Gerard then permanently blocked TRT's account on that basis. This block was quickly reversed and reapplied several times, with a number of administrators involved on both sides. Several users felt that Gerard had not offered enough evidence that TRT was a reincarnation, while others either shared Gerard's opinion or felt that TRT's behavior towards RickK warranted a block regardless.
Rholton, one of the administrators involved in unblocking TRT, inquired on the wikitech mailing list to see if a developer could check TRT's IP address. Developer Brion Vibber replied that TRT was not using an IP in the 142.177 range. This technical evidence, combined with Michael Snow's assessment (based on his familiarity with the banned user's modus operandi) that TRT was not a reincarnation of that particular user, convinced the majority of admins in the discussion (David Gerard included) that TRT was not 142. Disagreement continued over whether or not TRT's pattern of editing constituted "stalking" (and, if so, whether or not such behavior was blockable under current policy).
Arbitration and intervention from above
The discussion concerning TRT, which, by March 10th, was already occurring at the Administrators' noticeboard, the Requests for comment page, the wikien-l mailing list, and several user talk pages, branched out further when BM filed a request for arbitration against David Gerard (eventually Neutrality and Cyrius were added to the request), who had blocked TRT on the grounds that he was a reincarnation. BM contended that due process had not been followed, and that insufficient evidence existed to prove that TRT was a reincarnation.
The Arbitration Committee moved almost unanimously to reject with only one member (Fred Bauder) voting to accept the case. The two arbitrators who were named as respondents to the case recused themselves, as did arbitrator Theresa knott, who had been involved in the discussion at WP:AN/I earlier. Knott also finally unblocked TRT after it was generally agreed that he was not a reincarnation. After concerns were raised about the Arbitration Committee ruling on a matter involving its own members, Jimmy Wales stepped in to take over the case.
In a statement posted in place of the arbitration request, Wales blocked TRT permanently for disruptive editing (he singled out TRT's behavior towards RickK) and disruptive posts to the mailing list. He noted that he felt Gerard and others had acted in good faith by blocking the user when they did, and that no consequences were necessary. He further commented that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia project, not an experiment in democracy, and that good faith actions taken by administrators to protect the work of building an encyclopedia are therefore allowable even if outside the strict limits of currently established policy.
The aftermath
Wales's comments ended the discussion at the arbitration page, but conversations continued on the Administrators' noticeboard. Rholton said, "I am very relieved that Jimbo decided to take this upon himself. It probably was the only way to achieve a satisfactory conclusion." By contrast, BM argued that the way in which Wales stepped in to take the case "needlessly weakened the consensus and social sinews of the project, and in the end hurt the project." However, the discussion tapered off, and it remains to be seen whether any changes or clarifications to policy will result.
Changes to dispute resolution lead to controversy
Attempts were made to remodel several different aspects of the dispute resolution process last week, but all of them met with resistance, either over a lack of notice or outright opposition to the proposed changes.
Arbitration policy amendment adopted, then revote opened
The arbitration policy has received no significant updates since the creation of the arbitration process at the beginning of 2004. Last November, an amendment was proposed and voted on, and seemed to have fairly solid support. Most of the changes were proposed in order to bring the formal policy in line with the actual practices of the Arbitration Committee.
According to its terms, the November vote required at least 100 total votes and 70% support in order to pass. The vote was supposed to last two weeks, at the close of which the vote was 44-8 in favor. No action was taken at that point, and votes continued to trickle in until it stood at 58-14 in favor.
At the suggestion of arbitrator Grunt, Jimbo Wales stepped in last Friday to ratify the proposed amendment as officially adopted based on the results of this vote. Wales indicated that the threshold set of 100 support votes had been "overly ambitious" considering that 500 edits were required in order to be eligible to vote. He added that policy amendments would not necessarily be handled this way in the future.
However, this ratification prompted a new round of objections over the failure to follow the process outlined at the beginning of the vote, as well as the appearance of self-serving decisions by Wales and the arbitrators. To deal with this, a revote was started to try and get a result that complied with the procedures established at the beginning of the vote. Due to concerns expressed about individual aspects of the proposal, the revote is being conducted as a separate vote regarding each item in the proposed amendment. The revote also set a higher requirement for passage of 80% support for each item.
Requests for comment overhaul debated
The requests for comment process also had some changes implemented last week and promptly disputed, and an edit war even resulted over the page.
For a few weeks, Jguk and a few others have been working on a draft of some amendments to the handling of user conduct disputes within the RfC system. The proposal was mentioned on a few talk pages related to dispute resolution, but not widely advertised.
Among other things, the proposal would have eliminated the requirement that an RfC listing be certified by two different people. It also created a specific timetable to identify when the listing would be closed and deleted. With no objections having been raised, Jguk changed the main RfC page last Thursday to correspond with the terms of the proposal.
This promptly drew an objection from Netoholic, who reverted the page back to its previous state, and the two reverted back and forth until each had exhausted his limit of three reverts. At this point, a notice was placed on the page instead indicating that there were two competing versions being considered.
With the additional publicity, a number of people raised their concerns about the changes. The proposal to routinely delete old listings in particular received considerable opposition. Finally Maurreen, one of Jguk's collaborators on the draft changes, suggested that everyone involved get a fresh start and work together to develop agreeable changes to the system.
Attempt to resurrect quickpolls
Meanwhile, Merovingian introduced a proposal on Friday to bring back quickpolls, an experiment started in March 2004 to provide relatively swift action for violations of certain policies. Quickpolls allowed people to vote on whether 24-hour blocks should be applied to users for violating the three-revert rule or other misbehavior. The system could also theoretically be used for desysoping, although it was never applied for this purpose.
After a 30-day experiment, a review of the experience showed that many people were dissatisfied with quickpolls as a way of enforcing the three-revert rule, even though that had been the primary use for quickpolls during the experiment. As a result, the quickpoll system fell into disuse and was retired.
With this history, the proposed reintroduction of quickpolls so far has not proved to be a popular idea. In the poll on whether to have quickpolls again, the latest tally had more than two people opposing for every supporter of the proposal.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed a case brought against Xed last week with a three-month ban, but avoided the touchy issue of whether private emails could be considered as evidence in arbitration.
Xed and Slrubenstein
In a dispute that didn't even particularly involve any articles, but was conducted on user talk pages and by email, Slrubenstein and Xed got into a war of words over Xed's treatment of Jimbo Wales (one of Xed's first actions on Wikipedia last September was to request arbitration against Wales over an email he had sent to Secretlondon). The only connection to the encyclopedia was that the argument could be traced back to a dispute at the beginning of the year over whether to add a banner about relief efforts for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake to the Main Page, when Xed again took the opportunity to criticize Wales for suggesting that the banner be removed.
At the time, Wales had an exchange with Xed about how he felt Xed was treating him. A month afterward, Slrubenstein left Xed a message in the same section of his talk page saying, "You have such a small, petty mind." About ten days later, Xed responded with a message that concluded, "Fuck off you little shit". After Ed Poor had blocked Xed for this personal attack, Xed sent Slrubenstein a rather offensive email, but rather than deal with the question of whether they could base a decision on evidence of this nature, the arbitrators chose not to consider the email.
The Arbitration Committee ultimately considered other evidence showing a history of personal attacks by Xed on a number of users. In spite of Xed's contribution in helping start the Countering systemic bias project, the arbitrators decided to ban him for three months based on "a continuing pattern of personal attacks and disruptive assumption of bad faith". He was also placed on a personal attack parole for one year. Slrubenstein was cautioned to avoid personal attacks, but received no other sanctions.
Xed maintained that the case, originally based on a request for arbitration by Snowspinner, was brought in bad faith due to Snowspinner's dislike for the Countering systemic bias project. He argued that his responses to Slrubenstein were natural human reactions to abuse, and also criticized Snowspinner's presentation of the evidence as misrepresenting his contributions to Wikipedia.
Other cases closed
Personal attacks were also the focus of the case against PSYCH, which was closed on Saturday. In this matter, the arbitrators imposed a personal attack parole on PSYCH for a period of one year.
Finally, the case against Robert Blair (not to be confused with one of his opponents in the dispute over circumcision, Robert the Bruce) appeared set to close, but has not been formally closed at this writing. It appeared that Robert Blair would be banned from editing articles related to the dispute for a year, subject to 24-hour blocks for violations.
Snowspinner initiates two cases, offers to bring more
Two of the new requests had a tangential connection in that they dealt with the significance of the term "republic", which has figured in various politically charged disputes. On Tuesday the arbitrators accepted a case brought by Snowspinner regarding WHEELER, who developed an article entitled Classical definition of republic when his text was removed from the Republic article. The complaint cited this and other discussions as examples of original research and POV pushing.
Meanwhile, the question of whether Australia is a republic, part of a dispute over the Government of Australia article, led to a request when Adam Carr was briefly blocked Wednesday for making personal attacks. However, the arbitrators suggested that the earlier stages of dispute resolution would be more appropriate for this case.
Snowspinner also made the request in the other newly opened case last week, involving Dr Zen. In this case, Snowspinner indicated that he had been asked by other users to make the request, and he was later joined in making it by Raul654. The dispute focused on daily reverts over the Clitoris article.
Snowspinner later added on the mailing list that he was willing to submit any case on behalf of others if he felt it had merit. With Snowspinner's controversial participation in other aspects of dispute resolution (see related story), this proposal received a decidedly mixed reaction.
Another power outage briefly knocks out website
Wikipedia suffered another power outage last Monday, but unlike the last incident (see archived story) it proved to be a relatively simple problem and service was restored after a couple of hours.
Developer Kate Turner reported that the Wikimedia Foundation's websites were inaccessible for about two hours (around 13:00 to 15:00 UTC), as a result of a power strip blowing out. Unlike the power outage two weeks earlier, it was not caused by any problems at the colocation facility, but was simply the result of faulty equipment.
The outage affected the switch that connects the server network to the internet, meaning that access to Wikipedia was cut off entirely. Several machines also lost power, but not the database server, thus avoiding the extended delay that was needed last time in order to restore the database to service.
After power was restored, performance remained slow for a while as the affected machines were brought back online. Grunt reported experiencing technical glitches and said the site "moves about as fast as a zombie". As things began to improve, the site briefly went back into read-only mode on Tuesday. Complaints about performance continued to be registered periodically over the next few days at the OpenFacts status page.
Image server overloaded
Another problem cropped up due to the image server being overloaded. Developer Jamesday reported on Tuesday that the main Wikimedia image server, which hosts images for all Wikimedia projects including the Commons image repository, was experiencing more read requests than it could keep up with.
As a result, images were removed from a number of frequently used templates as a temporary measure to reduce the load. To deal with the problem, a new server is being purchased with more disk space and memory. Jamesday indicated this would either replace the image server if necessary, or else be used as a database server. Also, additional technical measures are being designed that will hopefully reduce the amount of work the image server needs to do.
In the media: Prolific editors featured, German magazine plagiarizes
Wired talks to the Wikipediholics
Following up on Wired Magazine's feature on Wikipedia The Book Stops Here (see archived story), Wired News has taken another look at what drives people to become wikipediholics, devoting extraordinary amounts of time and energy working on the project. The article, entitled Wiki Becomes a Way of Life, is dedicated to quick glimpses into work of six of Wikipedia's most prolific editors, whom it calls "power Wikipedians".
Derek Ramsey of Pennsylvania, the combination of man and machine responsible for over 140,000 edits to Wikipedia, lists his hobbies as photography, woodworking, cooking, gardening, chess, aquariums and computers. Talking about why he spends up to six hours a day working on Wikipedia articles, Ramsey said "I feel strongly in the ideals that Wikipedia stands for, and that drives me to use my programming skills to be as productive as possible."
Daniel Mayer, otherwise known as Maveric149, echoed Ramsey's sentiments, describing Wikipedia as "...democratizing knowledge on a massive scale", and said he was "proud to be a part of it". Meanwhile Stacey Greenstein opined that a project which had the potential to foster chaos had in fact encouraged responsibility. "The concept of 'freedom to do as we please' has finally begun its maturation to 'responsible to do what we need'", he said.
Different users focus their energies on different themes. Bryan Derksen reckons he spends 70% of his Wikipedia time fixing minor errors, utilising the other 30% for more substantive work when he feels creative. Seth Ilys, meanwhile, intends to create all the maps that are needed for articles relating to all 50 U.S. states.
Charles Matthews says "(I'll) tell you how you know you're a Wikipedian," he said. "You read any nonfiction book from the index end first. (And you think), 'I wonder if our coverage of this is complete.'"
The reporter, Daniel Terdiman, incorrectly identified Stacey Greenstein as being female in the initial version of the article, but Wired quickly made a correction.
New model for the debate over Wikipedia
Clay Shirky, one of Wikipedia's frequent advocates in the public debate over the merits of the project, now has come up with a new way of looking at the debate itself. In a blog post last Wednesday, he drew an analogy with coordinate systems to shed light on why those who love Wikipedia and those who hate it have such difficulty understanding the opposite point of view. Using this model, Wikipedians are apparently radial thinkers, concerned with the direction of change rather than fixing on a specific target; anti-Wikipedians are Cartesians, focussing on the final destination and sceptical of the notion that incremental change can get them there.
Shirky's colleague on the Many-to-Many blog, danah boyd, responded that she was unsure about the model, but agreed that she looks at things from a different perspective. She reiterated that she prefers not to compare Wikipedia with an encyclopedia, but indicated that neither particularly solves the problems she is most interested in.
German magazine plagiarizes from Wikipedia
Mainstream news sources now frequently cite Wikipedia articles. But German Wikipedianer have seen Germany's best-selling weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, take things a step further by copying large chunks of an article from the German Wikipedia, and neglecting to attribute it. de:Völkermord an den Tutsi was quoted verbatim in an article on the magazine's website about the Rwandan Genocide, as if it were the reporter's own work and without any mention of its source. The article was later retracted, and replaced with an apology. "Of course this is completely opposing the Spiegel Online editorial guidelines", the newspaper said. "We strongly apologize to the creators and authors of Wikipedia."
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-03-09-n29.html
Citations this week
As yet, a similar situation is not known to have occurred with the English Wikipedia. News outlets citing us honestly this week include the Mail & Guardian of South Africa recommending the article on the French Revolution as a primer on how to run a successful revolution; The Boston Herald notes that both E-mail and Email are listed on Wikipedia as acceptable forms of the word; the Northern Illinois University magazine discusses the problem of senioritis; and The Star in Malaysia quotes from Snoop Doggy Dogg, noting that Wikipedia provides more information on the rapper than his own web page does.
Reinstatement of adminship requested for Guanaco
A request was made last Tuesday to restore the adminship of Guanaco, the only user so far to have lost adminship as the result of an arbitration case. Guanaco's nomination received considerable support, but with the one-week voting period coming to a close, it appears that it will not succeed on this occasion.
How Guanaco lost his adminship
Guanaco lost his adminship as the result of an arbitration case that arose when he blocked Cantus, who was subject to a revert parole from a previous arbitration case. Cantus tried to complain about the block on the Village pump and a number of admins' talk pages, but Guanaco reverted these edits because Cantus was circumventing the block.
The block turned out to be improper because there was no actual violation of the parole; the decision found that Cantus had "limited his reverts to a barely acceptable level." The ruling also noted that Guanaco's use of admin abilities had been controversial on several previous occasions, and the arbitrators decided to require Guanaco to reapply for adminship.
The ensuing vote on whether Guanaco should remain an admin ended almost in a dead heat, with supporters outnumbering opponents by one, and a number of people deciding to remain neutral on the question. As there was no consensus for his continued adminship, steward Angela removed his sysop status on 10 December.
The new request
With nearly three months having passed, Snowspinner nominated Guanaco for adminship again, calling the removal "a misguided debacle masquerading as a referendum." Guanaco accepted the nomination, saying, "I hope the community will forgive my past mistakes."
This time around, the vote was not quite as evenly split, as Guanaco received more support, including some from people who had opposed or remained neutral in the previous vote. Cyrius commented, "That Guanaco was able to accept the removal of his admin status speaks well of him."
However, some users felt that the intervening time was not enough to resolve their concerns and continued to oppose. Ruhrjung observed that on its own, Guanaco's editing history since losing his adminship "would hardly have motivated a candidacy."
Early in the voting, several people registered themselves as being neutral. As more information came out about Guanaco's recent removal of Willy on Wheels from the list of banned users (for semantic reasons), along with his use of bots, these users joined the ranks of those opposing adminship. This seemed to swing the balance, as before these revelations the nomination was somewhat above the 80% percent support threshold that usually signals a successful candidate. The shift left the request likely to fail, barring a significant turnout of additional supporters over the final day.