The vandals are winning

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
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CrowsNest
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The vandals are winning

Post by CrowsNest » Fri Dec 21, 2018 6:11 pm

An internal Wikipedia report about the latest round of vandadalism contained this snippet.....
The English Wikipedia Main Page is very rich and dense with links to the content of the encyclopedia. There are a lot of positive things to say about this, but there is also this situation-related negative: at any given time, there are over 100 high-viewership main page article targets for vandals (including this vandal) to attack. One of the ways to mitigate harm from these types of compromises and vandalism attacks is to reduce the number of high-value targets. Obviously, any consideration of changing the way the Main Page operates will take extensive community discussion and consideration, and potential for disruptive vandalism that has the ability to harm the reputation of the project is only one factor.
What a pathetic admission of defeat. If you can't monitor even a hundred articles a day against someone wanting to insert an image of a penis into them, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE A LIST OF THOSE ARTICLES IN ADVANCE, then what fucking use are you?

I could solve that problem in half a day. As could any half decent programmer. Are they all busy doing other things right now? Or are they just thick as mince?

Undoubtedly related......

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/vie ... f=19&t=930

An enterprising user trying their best to combat vandals in a big way. Told to sit down, shut up, and respect the wisdom and authoritah of the Wikipedia Administrators, and their lickspittle followers.

Who wrote that white flag of a report? A Wikipedia Administrator. Who ran around crying their eyes out and panicking while this vandal attacked again and again? Their lickspittle followers.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Dec 23, 2018 4:07 am

CrowsNest wrote:What a pathetic admission of defeat. If you can't monitor even a hundred articles a day against someone wanting to insert an image of a penis into them, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE A LIST OF THOSE ARTICLES IN ADVANCE, then what fucking use are you?

They have known about this "little problem" because the front page itself was one of Wikipedia's first vandalism targets in 2001....followed by whatever "featured article" was listed there. Idiot vandalism is very predictable and SHOULD be easy to control. Thanks to their chronic dysfunction and kneejerk dishonesty, they refuse to address it directly.

Most of the active admins today are patrollers. If Wikimedia had an effective vandalism bot, the patrollers would be useless. And then Wikipedia could get rid of them. Yikes, we can't do that!!!

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by Dysklyver » Mon Dec 24, 2018 12:18 am

ericbarbour wrote:
CrowsNest wrote:What a pathetic admission of defeat. If you can't monitor even a hundred articles a day against someone wanting to insert an image of a penis into them, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE A LIST OF THOSE ARTICLES IN ADVANCE, then what fucking use are you?

They have known about this "little problem" because the front page itself was one of Wikipedia's first vandalism targets in 2001....followed by whatever "featured article" was listed there. Idiot vandalism is very predictable and SHOULD be easy to control. Thanks to their chronic dysfunction and kneejerk dishonesty, they refuse to address it directly.

Most of the active admins today are patrollers. If Wikimedia had an effective vandalism bot, the patrollers would be useless. And then Wikipedia could get rid of them. Yikes, we can't do that!!!


There's already at least two fully tested BAG approved bots with programs to temporarily protect every page linked to from the mainpage, for the duration it is linked, but these measures keep stalling to to lack of community approval. Apparently you are only allowed to protect a page manually - after it's been vandalised. Automated preemptive protection is clearly evil.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by CrowsNest » Mon Dec 24, 2018 1:22 am

Pre-emptive protection is the coward's way out, the expansion of which over the years is the clearest admission of defeat you will ever see on Wikipedia. When I said I could fix this, I meant without breaking any of the fundamental tenets of Wikipedia, one of which is to assume every edit is good until shown otherwise, as opposed to assuming every edit will be bad so you must make good people jump through extra hoops because you've built a website that can't do what you told the public it could do.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by Dysklyver » Mon Dec 24, 2018 11:50 am

CrowsNest wrote:Pre-emptive protection is the coward's way out, the expansion of which over the years is the clearest admission of defeat you will ever see on Wikipedia. When I said I could fix this, I meant without breaking any of the fundamental tenets of Wikipedia, one of which is to assume every edit is good until shown otherwise, as opposed to assuming every edit will be bad so you must make good people jump through extra hoops because you've built a website that can't do what you told the public it could do.


But how exactly?

Say for example there is Mr. Goatse, who using a ton of proxies, spams images to each of the hundred pages, as is his custom. Wikipedia's answer is edit filters, meaning that images can't be added to the page.

For example on Apollo 8, todays TFA which went live on 00:01 24 December 2018.

(cur | prev) 00:02, 24 December 2018‎ MusikBot (talk | contribs)‎ . . (88,252 bytes) +16‎ . . (Tagging as {{Current TFA}}) (undo)


This is MusikBot, it is tagging the article with an advanced protection template. This template, once applied, cannot be removed except by an admin or MusikBot, and while on the page, prevents the addition of any images by new or unregistered editors.

Then vandals make some edits, all reverted, and then someone protects the page. In this instance it was then vandalised 12 times over two hours, until:

(cur | prev) 02:17, 24 December 2018‎ Mifter (talk | contribs)‎ m . . (88,252 bytes) 0‎ . . (Changed protection level for "Apollo 8": Persistent vandalism ([Edit=Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access] (expires 02:17, 26 December 2018 (UTC)) [Move=Require administrator access] (indefinite))) (undo | thank)


This is very typical, it happens almost exactly like this, every single day.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon Dec 24, 2018 12:38 pm

The Niels Högel effect. He did this to resuscitate patients and to impress his colleges. Like a fireman who is a pyromaniac.

They create a not existing problem with a tremendous lot of noise, we are a small volontair organisation and we are sinking, so give us your money, we will fix the European copyright if you give us that money, and we will solve also the discrimination of black people in Nigeria and the huge emancipation problem in Holland. The gender desk is a good example of the noice making system, look how terrible the situation is, we need help. Now the gender desk is used to save Alexander, it was not so bad what happend and it was only a incident. Drmies troll account is also a part of that system, pissing on woman so they need help. I think if you put your hand in the slip of many of that "gender girls" you find something complete different than you expected.....

Even that stone aged software is cherished for that reason, because what else must guys like Erik Zachte, Data Analyst at Wikimedia Foundation do for living if they hire Vigilant?
Last edited by Graaf Statler on Mon Dec 24, 2018 1:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by CrowsNest » Mon Dec 24, 2018 12:55 pm

Dysklyver wrote:
CrowsNest wrote:Pre-emptive protection is the coward's way out, the expansion of which over the years is the clearest admission of defeat you will ever see on Wikipedia. When I said I could fix this, I meant without breaking any of the fundamental tenets of Wikipedia, one of which is to assume every edit is good until shown otherwise, as opposed to assuming every edit will be bad so you must make good people jump through extra hoops because you've built a website that can't do what you told the public it could do.


But how exactly?

My Christmas spirit doesn't extend to giving the WMF free tips on how to make their website meet their strategic goals. But there are multiple possible approaches. They already use some already, they're just too incompetent to do it properly. Some of the stuff they seem to struggle with, is child's play, so you can imagine what some serious engineering could bring to the problem. I made this point on Wikipediocracy with a specific example, and they freaked the fuck out. In that respect, it is hardly worth even giving them tips. Like pearls before swine.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Dec 28, 2018 7:56 am

CrowsNest wrote:My Christmas spirit doesn't extend to giving the WMF free tips on how to make their website meet their strategic goals. But there are multiple possible approaches. They already use some already, they're just too incompetent to do it properly. Some of the stuff they seem to struggle with, is child's play, so you can imagine what some serious engineering could bring to the problem. I made this point on Wikipediocracy with a specific example, and they freaked the fuck out. In that respect, it is hardly worth even giving them tips. Like pearls before swine.

You can give all the free advice you want. Others have already tried. Virtually all of it was ignored, except PERHAPS for flagged revisions and a few other things. They filched that from the original inventor and claimed it was invented in-house. MediaWiki is a wonderland of "borrowed" code, although not surprisingly for an open-source project.

Wikimedia is no different from any other corporation, profit or nonprofit. Not Invented Here is a cardinal rule. "How dare you tell us what to do!!" It would all be fine and even tolerable if they didn't lie like rugs about everything imaginable.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jan 06, 2019 4:44 am

The vandals are winning so hard, a frustrated and short-sighted proposal to indefinitely semi-protect the RefDesks has quickly snowballed into a proposal to shut them down completely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... (proposals)#Indefinitely_protecting_the_refdesk

This is like the owner of a house knocking it down because he can't stop the walls being graffiti'd, even though he has yet to try any other measure stronger than briefly switching the lights on and shouting out the window.

The Wikipediots seem to have gotten as far as realising that the vandal is getting his jollies from seeing them applying short term protections as a result of his activities, but rather than try longer periods, they jump straight to proposing indefinite, and then to shutting it down completely before that even passes.

It seems obvious to me, but I'm not a dumb Wikipediot, that if the vandal really is getting pleasure from seeing his efforts result in short term protection, then he will have the best orgasm he ever had if he succeeds in getting them shut down. And eager for another, they will set their minds to seeing what other parts of Wikipedia they are willing to discard.

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Re: The vandals are winning

Post by Dysklyver » Sun Jan 06, 2019 11:40 am

Strong Oppose - Being too lazy to clean up the mess is not a valid reason for admins to unilaterally disregard WP:PILLARS and turn a section of Wikipedia into a secret clubhouse that only they can participate in. 79.134.4.188 (talk) 09:19, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Unsurprisingly, this IP comment was made from an open proxy. Favonian (talk) 09:35, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Please WP:Assume Good Faith there are many reasons to use an open proxy. Zell Faze (talk) 19:18, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

...and many more reasons to block them as soon as we identify them. If you actually have a good reason to use a proxy, you can apply for Wikipedia:IP block exemption. {{unsigned|Favonian}}

@Favonian: What the hell is that supposed to mean? 142.160.89.97 (talk) 05:20, 6 January 2019 (UTC)


Wikipedians showing why it is pointless allowing IP editing anyway. :roll:

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