I SAW WHAT YOU DID THERE.

[reddragdiva]

WikiScanner is taking the press by storm. Two calls today from the BBC and one from The Independent. The line I took:

• We've had conflicted editing since the beginning, and companies getting caught out. This is just another example. We've told people over and over, and now this is hitting the press and the general public are up in arms about it.
• The almost-complete edit history of Wikipedia has always been available — click on the "history" tab. And people have been caught with it before. This is another approach to the same thing.
• We don't try to nail companies on it, because we appreciate they sometimes just don't know how to approach us. We don't want people scared to talk to us.
• The best way to deal with problems in your entry is to be completely honest and open about who you are and why you're there. In general, getting caught out being less than utterly honest online will get you eaten alive.
• If something's dangerous or slanderous, of course, contact the Foundation and you can be sure it'll be looked at seriously and quickly.

So I'm on BBC Radio 5 Live on Wake up To Money tomorrow morning around 5:55am. (There's an MP3 podcast of it.) The things I do for Wikipedia ... They got Virgil Griffiths, who wrote WikiScanner, to comment as well. Should be interesting.

By the way: I told you so.

Update: One quote! I got up at 5:45am for one quote! Mind you, I did start to waffle. MP3, 20:25 to 23:24. Pretty good.

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

I saw an article on it over someone's shoulder in a paper today, I think. Didn't manage to see which one, though.

One other point you might want to make: this is a really good example of taking our system and our data and doing something unexpected and useful with it, letting us look at it in a different way; advantages of open content and structured information and so on and so forth, and we really like people doing weird and wonderful things.

Perhaps not the best angle for early-morning Radio 5, but it might come in handy elsewhere :-)

[reddragdiva]

Yes, get all Web 2.0 on them!

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

you'll have to register wikipedr.com to do that.

[reddragdiva]

I see that whoever answered this one answered much as you suggest.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Mmm. We're getting pretty good coverage from this - I like that the tone is 'faintly outraged people are doing silly things to a fine upstanding site', which is an advance on most!

I do wonder how accurate it is for old data, though. I mean, some of the edits are two or three years old - what proportion of corporate networks are in the same IP ranges now as they were back then? Changes aren't uncommon...

[reddragdiva]

They change, but not over that short a timeframe.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but when you're dealing with so many organisations, the size of the population means uncommon events crop up.

(I know we changed at work last year, and had apparently done so again a few years previous - it was a real hassle because so many subscription resources were working by IP address, and we didn't catch them all for ages)

[vatine]

To the etent that people change ISP, basically. One of the reasons the leased-line market is not nearly as fluid as one might've thought (it's a right royal pain renumbering everything, it's a right royal pain to NAT, it's a right royal pain getting a PI allocation).

[richgoth.livejournal.com]

Do you want to be on the radio over here too? :)
Liz has my email

[reddragdiva]

You pay for the call!

[richgoth.livejournal.com]

hehe sure!

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

It's not all sweetness and light, though (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009274.html).

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Technically, Cramer wasn't up for a Hugo just because she worked for a magazine that was up for the semi-prozine Hugo. It's completely possible for the fanzine Hugo to go to a magazine that the fan writer Hugo winner of the year never published in or for someone to win the novel Hugo while a completely different editor wins the professional editor Hugo. Technically, the novel, not the author, is the Hugo winner, too, so I can see Cramer's point if I squint, but she's part of a team at the New York Review of Science Fiction, not the sole proprietor.

[reddragdiva]

What got to me about that thread was the breathtaking sense of entitlement. I'm not sure they'll ever understand this is not an effective way to get any of the things they consider themselves entitled to, and that Making Light running attack articles on individuals after the last time they were banned (and then unbanned) for running attack articles on individuals beggars belief.

Well, yes, famous s.f. authors agree with them

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Any author who doesn't agree with them is extremely odd.

[reddragdiva]

If I'd read this previous thread first, I doubt I'd have bothered on this one. No doubt it's admin arrogance on my part making that thread look to me like someone coming on to inform and getting attacked by erudite howler monkeys.

[vatine]

Not being an "insider" either in the Wikipedia community nor a regular follower of MakingLight (or, indeed, knowing much more about the Nielsen Haydens than they have a double-barrel non-hyphenated surname), it probably looks different to me than to you.

The "blocked-user" thread, I can't make heads nor tails of, so I just shrug and go "someone whinges, wikipeeps may or may not have done something wrong. Sky not falling; ignore".

The Hugo-related thread can be summarised as "fan-wank and whinging, wikipeeps whinge and wank too. Sky not falling; ignore".

I'm still firmly convicted that a complete ban of anonymous edits would be a good thing for Wikipedia, possibly with an enforced log-out after every N edits (makes it harder for people to edit a lot in one go, but it may, just may, be worth it). But as I'm not a Wikipedia insider, I can only speculate (and point out that I'm proposing technical solutions to people problems).

[reddragdiva]

Blocking anons would stop a lot of random rubbish, but would also fail to hook new addicts. Forced logout to slow editing would slow good users but wouldn't stop problem users for a second, because a fuckhead is unstoppable by any mere technical obstacle.

[vatine]

Creating an account takes, what, 20 seconds. If you try to edit as anonymous, it could swing you past a login/create page on the way. It'd probably stop a fraction of "good first-comer edits", the question is if it'd be worth it from the lack of random click-by edits.

The forced log-out wasn't so much a "slow-down" as a "cool-down". But it's very MUCH a technical solution to a people problem. To fix the root cause would require predicting the ass-hattery potential for any new editor for up to 100 years in advance and fail those who would become ass-hattish enough to become a problem and I can think of no means to do this.

The Nielsen Haydens are fans with teeth

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

They're not just fans. They work at one of the three surviving major imprints for science fiction and fantasy. PNH is editor in chief at Tor, more from management skills than anything else.

Anyone who wants a Tor deal or a job at Tor has to agree with them, so they don't tend to get checked in their pronouncements by anyone around them on a daily basis. Running into a discourse community that doesn't know how important they are and which isn't concerned about getting publishing with them seems to be a shock to them.

Re: The Nielsen Haydens are fans with teeth

[vatine]

I didn't even say they were fans (or not), I said they mentioned fan-wanking (I can't characterise the "'zines win 'zine-Hugos, not people" debate much more succinct than that). They do have a double-barrell surname, without hyphens, unless both of them happen to have "Nielsen" as a middle name (possible, I guess, but unlikely).