Wikimedia sysadmins begin using anti-spam tools to fight LTAs

[suckadmin]

>They have fought with spamming and "serial abusers" since 2003, they have fought like maniacs over all the related policies, and they still can't agree on how to deal with it. Uncounted THOUSANDS of patrolling and anti-spam bots have been written since the first one in 2006. Most were abandoned because either they were written by incompetent coders, or they caused more assorted problems than they fixed.....

I mean there's definitely a large amount of gross incompetence, over welming amounts of data and technical problems but for the love of Pete just turn off the fucking ip editing?

[ericbarbour]

I mean there's definitely a large amount of gross incompetence, over welming amounts of data and technical problems but for the love of Pete just turn off the fucking ip editing?

Every few months it is brought up AGAIN on noticeboards. And every time, it is voted down and silently buried. WP content generation is heavily dependent on IP-address editing. Many people refuse to create an account and IPs have added gigabytes of valid content. The nerds would rather play vandal-fighting games against the relatively few IPs that vandalize--it's "more fun" apparently. The WMF has been "thinking about" forcing the issue, but they have yet to act.

This pile of steaming shit was written by Dennis Brown in 2012. It was fought over and deletion was attempted more than once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... not_people

That crazy Irish admin Oliver "Torai" Moran wrote this, three years before the above. Also steaming shit. It appears Brown did nothing but copy Moran's essay and make it more negative. No one can accuse them of not being crass plagiarists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... _human_too

It's been listed in "Perennial proposals" since 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... om_editing
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... d=74545140

As I keep saying, WP is a nut magnet with an encyclopedia-whatsis attached as a "side effect". They need their nuts.

[suckadmin]

ok so it seems pretty clear the reason they continue to allow ip edits is a huge amount of "good" edits come from them (maybe even the majority) by users who are either too lazy to register accounts, want the anonymity of ip editing or both. The by products of socking and block evasion using proxies is deemed unimportant because any system that could effectively prevent it would drastically reduce editors. Essentially quantity over quality

[Ognistysztorm]

Here the page for LTA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped ... term_abuse

maybe BB could better explain how anti-spam tools are being used or abused .. or is it simply that ip range blocks are being issued and rubber stamped as LTA with little to no explanation?

Part of the problem is that defining LTA is subjective and doesn't provide any metrics. Some users may unwittingly use the word lately... how many times is too many or over what period of time is too much .. etc

Well, that's going to be the Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, in the context of data protection legislations such as GDPR and CCPA.

[suckadmin]

Here the page for LTA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped ... term_abuse

maybe BB could better explain how anti-spam tools are being used or abused .. or is it simply that ip range blocks are being issued and rubber stamped as LTA with little to no explanation?

Part of the problem is that defining LTA is subjective and doesn't provide any metrics. Some users may unwittingly use the word lately... how many times is too many or over what period of time is too much .. etc

Well, that's going to be the Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, in the context of data protection legislations such as GDPR and CCPA.

It would be if they started their own verification system using government ID or required real names to be used.

Otherwise I don't see how?

[Ognistysztorm]

Here the page for LTA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped ... term_abuse

maybe BB could better explain how anti-spam tools are being used or abused .. or is it simply that ip range blocks are being issued and rubber stamped as LTA with little to no explanation?

Part of the problem is that defining LTA is subjective and doesn't provide any metrics. Some users may unwittingly use the word lately... how many times is too many or over what period of time is too much .. etc

Well, that's going to be the Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, in the context of data protection legislations such as GDPR and CCPA.

It would be if they started their own verification system using government ID or required real names to be used.

Otherwise I don't see how?

Because they list out their personal activities together with their off-wiki accounts, as happened for Tirgil34? With the right tools In political murky cases these could then be weaponised by adversarial powers to harass or harm them. In Canada IP addresses have been de facto classified as personal information.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/suprem ... -1.7130727

[suckadmin]

Well, that's going to be the Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, in the context of data protection legislations such as GDPR and CCPA.

It would be if they started their own verification system using government ID or required real names to be used.

Otherwise I don't see how?

Because they list out their personal activities together with their off-wiki accounts, as happened for Tirgil34? With the right tools In political murky cases these could then be weaponised by adversarial powers to harass or harm them. In Canada IP addresses have been de facto classified as personal information.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/suprem ... -1.7130727

But that was in regards to police requesting ip addresses without warrants. If you ip edit WP you are volunteering that information but not your realname. Not to mention that most users ip address change frequently.

I was wondering how the EU's right to deletion might impact this .. if the ip address is considered personal data despite how the IP could reappear as it was naturally being used by someone else at a later time.

It might be a motivation to turn off ip edits .. the old entries would probably be grandfathered in.

[Ognistysztorm]

It would be if they started their own verification system using government ID or required real names to be used.

Otherwise I don't see how?

Because they list out their personal activities together with their off-wiki accounts, as happened for Tirgil34? With the right tools In political murky cases these could then be weaponised by adversarial powers to harass or harm them. In Canada IP addresses have been de facto classified as personal information.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/suprem ... -1.7130727

But that was in regards to police requesting ip addresses without warrants. If you ip edit WP you are volunteering that information but not your realname. Not to mention that most users ip address change frequently.

I was wondering how the EU's right to deletion might impact this .. if the ip address is considered personal data despite how the IP could reappear as it was naturally being used by someone else at a later time.

It might be a motivation to turn off ip edits .. the old entries would probably be grandfathered in.

Besides, LTA pages could fall afoul of Australia's proposed anti-doxxing law as well:

https://apnews.com/article/australia-do ... 99fe3c55df

[suckadmin]

Besides, LTA pages could fall afoul of Australia's proposed anti-doxxing law as well:

https://apnews.com/article/australia-do ... 99fe3c55df

Possibly.. although that has less do with anti spam tools and ip edits than with people going out of their way to make public other pieces of identifying information

[ericbarbour]

Well, that's going to be the Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, in the context of data protection legislations such as GDPR and CCPA.

There is one main reason Wikipedia exists: Section 230. A poorly considered but sweeping AMERICAN law that left the internet wide open for crusades by anonymous people of all kinds. NOTCENSORED literally dates from the original ideas Larry Sanger and that hopeless nit The Cunctator first wrote up in 2001-02. Others fought like crazy over the censorship angle in 2005. Because it's hosted in the USA (with backup servers in a couple other countries), only USA law directly applies. The EU and other countries can pass all kinds of "child protection" and "user privacy" etc. etc. laws they want--forcing the WMF to comply is another matter entirely.

Wikipedia is already totally blocked in China, North Korea and Myanmar. It is partly/temporarily blocked in Russia, Belarus, various Muslim countries, and Venezuela. The WMF digs its heels in when someone like Turkey or Saudi Arabia demands the removal of content. "We're in America and we have a worldwide cult following, nyah nyah". People in those countries have been imprisoned for editing, or even merely for reading, certain WP content.

The Chinese government did a SHIT job of handling this since 2004, and WP has a long article to nyah-nyah at them. Wales tried to intervene, failed, and the CCP twisted his words in translation. So they BOTH failed. It's NOTCENSORED until a government decides it is--locally.

Besides, LTA pages could fall afoul of Australia's proposed anti-doxxing law as well:

That's a separate issue. The Aussie government is notorious for trying to censor certain websites "worldwide" because they don't like something. And failing. New Zealand tried to force the removal of things like the raid on Kim Dotcom's house and Brenton Tarrant's stupid livestream of his violent attack on a Christchurch mosque. You can still find that stuff online with a little digging. (coughencyclopediadramaticacough)

The WMF and the insiders would LOVE anti-doxing laws all over the place, then it would literally become a crime to post the real identity of an abusive WP insider. The UK and the Aussies might pass such a law but I seriously doubt the USA will. First Amendment and all that. Plus it's the exact opposite of NOTCENSORED, is it not? Funny how that works.