Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2012/January

Block unregistered users edits during a month or few days every year
I for some days now have had the urge to put forward this proposal. I don't know yet my final position especially since I value extremely highly any valid content contribution that is done to our project, especially from the sporadic reader. I'm putting this forward so we can discuss the feasibility of the idea and consider its possible impact and even alternatives, it can also serve to vent a bit our frustration. Each year, it seems that "dark" September is increasingly destructive and time consuming and some of the vandalisms does pass between our herculean efforts to fight childish pranks, inexperience that cover some people outright need to destroy that seems to pop out especially at this time that "kids" return to school. I haven't done any study on the event, it is all based in observation over the time. Is it only at this time of the year that it becomes so evident. That the lack of education, respect and morals gets expressed so strongly on our project, how it also affects other wikimedia initiatives ? Any information that is shared in this discussion will at least serve to elucidate the community and shame those the take the time to intentionally engage in pointless disruption. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 06:42, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Well after what feels like weeks of just spending my time reverting, blocking and deleting I'm inclined to agree. Luckily I've been off work for the last three weeks and have had time to deal with the vandalism. It feels though rather "anti" the principles of WMF to not allow unregistered users to edit. I'll sleep on it and respond more fully after I've thought about it more QU TalkQu 08:11, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * This isn't something that could be requested through a configuration change, if it's only to be temporary. I thought the edit filter was helping out with this.  (See all this you didn't have to revert?)  Please let me know if there's anything consistent that could possibly be automatically blocked.  Theoretically we could set up a filter to block any edits by an unregistered user to either all pages or those in specific namespaces.  While it might be against the principles of the WMF, we'd be able to implement said filter under the radar since it's not going through the developers. – Adrignola discuss 13:48, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * The edit filter certainly reduced a lot of the vandalism, but there's still a lot slipping through. I'll trawl back through my reverts as I should be able to pick out some patterns that could be added to the filters (or be put in new ones). Maybe it feels worse as, other than whichever admin happens to be around, there isn't much vandalism patrolling here from non-admin users. That's not to say there isn't some and it's all appreciated but the number of users checking RC seems quite low compared to a year back. QU TalkQu 13:55, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah, well, I thought that's what the Small Wiki Monitoring Team was for, as well as our opt-in to global sysops. Unless I was misinformed and such processes are actually for the smaller Wikipedias… – Adrignola discuss 15:11, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid that any such action will be like putting a finger in the dike. Eventually the vandals will find new places to knock holes in our dike and we will run out of fingers.  From where I sit, it appears that we have one rogue (but persistent) operator.  I do not want to take an action to prevent anons from contributing, even if it means twice-daily rollback/block parties.  Doing so means... "the terrorists win." No more mouthwash on the airplane for you, and please take off your shoes.  If it were possible to temporarily autoblock an IP registering a new account with certain keywords in the chosen username, that might be effective.  Or it might not.  Of course it might not be possible to implement without some dev work. --Jomegat (discuss • contribs) 15:20, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Agree with you. As an aside I think the problem is more than just the one persistent rogue. I've done about 100 blocks in the last three weeks. Most were IPs, which I usually only block on a second vandalism (the exception is for the occasional very "bad" vandalism). Again I have nothing other than a feeling but this feels a lot higher than usual. Most are clearly just people playing around who won't stop after a warning, but that doesn't make it easier! QU TalkQu 16:27, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * As an aside, I added an entry to MediaWiki:Titleblacklist which will stop any further accounts with that specific naming convention we've seen recently. The page can also block certain usernames, but you have to be good at regular expressions (which I'm not). – Adrignola discuss 20:30, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Maybe we could add a link to #cvn-sw, call it "Report Active Vandalism" and add it to the left pane someplace. --Jomegat (discuss • contribs) 15:29, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

A side note on the Edit Filter... I need to look at this in more detail but this should be trappable and there are a few more obvious "bad words" we can catch. A repeating character filter would help. The large removal filter should be applied to Talk:Main Page. Finally using the link spam filter on user pages would help with the new account created followed by spammed user page within five minutes scenario that leads to all the spam blacklist edits we make. Anyway, just some thoughts for now... QU TalkQu 16:51, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Stole another filter from en.wiki: Special:AbuseFilter/23. It's on tag-only mode for you to verify whether it has any false positives.  If you see that it's working well at catching the bad stuff, it can be set to disallow.  I'll see about something for the main page discussion page.  The link spam on user pages could be tricky; we could extend the current filter to user pages, but that would only generate a warning that can be ignored. – Adrignola discuss 21:07, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah cool, thanks. Filter23 - will check it over a few days / weeks for any false positives. Looks good on the real positives QU TalkQu 21:31, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Can't see any need for such a policy whatsoever. Vandalism is not very common (seems to be on average around 1 instance of vandalism per hour) and is generally quickly fixed (certainly fixed long before any ordinary reader would find it unless they were following RC).  Wikibooks is a very quiet wiki and such a policy is not needed here.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 23:14, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * This is regularly suggested on the English Wikipedia. The reasons it hasn't been implemented are: A large portion of our good edits come from IP addresses; positive experiences with initial IP edits lead users to create accounts who otherwise would not do so; software features disabling IPs from creating new articles or editing semiprotected ones are sufficient. According to Jimbo Wales, "what is commonly called 'anonymous' editing is not particularly anonymous ... and there are good reasons to want vandals on ip numbers instead of accounts". While about 97% of vandalism comes from anonymous users, about 76% or 82% of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, because those inclined to vandalism could easily take the 10 seconds to register.) The ability of anyone to edit articles without registering is a Foundation issue. Anyway, I know this is a different wiki project, but those reasons are probably still relevant. :) Banaticus (discuss • contribs) 00:16, 11 January 2012 (UTC)


 * As you can see in my initial post the proposal was more to start a discussion on what steps we could make than really prevent anonymous edit. Notice also that we have a very distinctive pattern that does not match wikipedia, here valid anonymous edits should be very far from the percentage you posted, a book is not an encyclopedic article, most anonymous edits done here are more about fixing spelling and format than really committing extensive content, and most of the deleted pages by speedy are initiated by anonymous contributors. We also have a pattern of a rampant vandalism every year at in the moth that school starts that was the reason for a specific but limit edit block. But in the fundamental reason no one seem to disagrees that anonymous edits should be maintained (even if we actively disincentive it but promoting registration)... --Panic (discuss • contribs) 01:24, 11 January 2012 (UTC)