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Re: Voting for nym


On Tue, 3 Jan 2006, cyphrpunk wrote: 
I would see a proxy as being, from Wikipedia's point of view, like an
ISP. It would be like aol.com or, more analogously, momandpopisp.com,
some ISP with a number of users. If one misbehaves at Wikipedia they
probably don't block the whole ISP. That would be an unfriendly action
that would give them a bad reputation. Instead they probably make an
effort to contact someone at the ISP responsible for abuse and tell
them about the user who caused trouble, letting the ISP block him.
Only if an ISP were persistently unresponsive to abuse complaints
would they be justified in blocking the entire ISP, and I imagine that
this is exactly what they do.

Most ISPs don't use a single outgoing IP address, and I've never seen anyone contact an external authority to have a user blocked; we just take care of it on wikipedia itself.

I've been doing a lot of "RC Patrol" lately (watching the list of edits for vandalism), and frequently high school students will try to turn the article about their high school into a message board ("l33tdud3 wuz here, peace to all my h0m13z"...). Standard practice for vandalism is to put increasingly dire warning messages on their "user talk" page (which displays a "You have new messages" message when they next view a page), then request one of the wikipedia admins to block them if they continue. When their username is blocked, their IP is also automatically blocked. High schools often come through a proxy with a single IP, and there's a standard notice that eventually gets added to the IP's talk page if both good and bad edits show up over time. It puts admins in a more difficult position, because blocking the IP also blocks the good users, and they'll try to be more lenient, but the process is ultimately the same. I've seen individual users vandalize multiple pages per minute, and by the time an admin gets around to blocking them, I've spent 20 minutes cleaning up after them. Nobody's going to wait around for an email response when something like that's happening. I can hit the "recent changes" link all day long and stay continuously busy repairing vandalism (and warning users) even without the prolific vandals that require continuous watching.

I agree that Jimmy is an excellent advocate to have. Maybe somebody else can get him interested again. I've emailed him several times without a response, although for all I know his spam filter is eating my messages.


						-J