I posted a thread similar to this a while back expressing my discontent with how Wikipedia encourages vandalism and sockpuppetry by allowing anonymous editing and allowing accounts to be registered without email addresses and causes editors to have to waste countless hours of their time reverting and blocking it. I stated that I had all but left the project, and I had given up on RC patrol, which comprised the bulk of the time I spent on Wikipedia, though I didn't totally leave in that I was participating in an effort to get an article on Encyclopedia Dramatica recreated, as I believed the fact that there wasn't an article on ED to be one of the more obvious cases of bias and censorship on Wikipedia. My efforts were not in vain, and now an article on Encyclopedia Dramatica does exist. But now that I'm done with that, I see little reason to return to Wikipedia at all except to actually read articles or possibly to say a few choice words to some editors who were rude to me in the past, let alone ever spend time reverting vandalism again. Basically I'm just ranting about how ridiculous RC patrol is and how embarrased I am that I let myself get sucked into it somehow. RC patrol consists of staring at a screen, going over an influx of hundreds and hundreds of edits, reviewing them to see if they constitute vandalism, and if they do, reverting them, warning the vandals, reverting them again, warning them, reverting them yet again, then finally reporting them, and the occaisional reverting vandalism to your userpage, by the occaisonal ticked-off vandal, and repeating this cycle ad infinum. And for what? A barnstar? You don't even get paid for this hard work. The ONLY time I even consider reverting vandalism anymore is if it is done to a page that I actually read or contributed to that I have on my watchlist, and I don't even bother going through the futile process of warniing the vandals anymore. But sitting in front of a screen for hours reverting vandalism done to pages you didn't even write, many of which few people even read anyway for no pay is just ridiculous. RC patrol, and for that matter editing Wikipedia as a whole can be compared to the work of a garbageman. You're glad that someone does it and society wouldn't be able to function as well without it, but you sure as hell don't won't to be the one doing it.

Guy should be chiming in here soon with a comment about how selfish and greedy you are, Puss, for actually expressing that you would want to make money off of your content-improvement efforts. The horror!

By the by, there's another wiki out there where you can create all kinds of new content and sort of "pay yourself as you go" by putting Google AdSense ads on each Directory page you create. It might only mean a few pennies a day for you, but it is something. I'm honor-bound not to mention exactly which of my wiki sites is in this biz. Sorry.

I don't think this will really affect Guy's opinion of me, which was low ever since he knew that I was trying to get the ED article recreated. He accused me of being in league with the "Grawp" vandal who he falsely believed originated at ED.

Pussy,

You're near the end of the journey out of the Wikipedia nightmare. All you need do now is shut down your account and get on with your life.

As I wrote to another admin feeling the strain (w.marsh):



Finally, some Goldfinger:

"My name is Galore. Pussy Galore"
"I must be dreaming"

I'm right there with you, sister. I've been wiki-free for 3+ weeks now, and it feels good. I look at the vandalism that pops up on the pages I used to patrol, and eventually, somebody else fixes it. No big deal. The world doesn't end just because "poop" remains on a page for an extra two minutes before somen=body else catches. No need for me to ever hit "Refresh" again.

If there were a "Barnstar of Common Sense," I would award it to you, and hope you returned the favor.

Bravo. You can give each other virtual barnstars, have them cancel, and never even have to bother to post them on each other's talk pages. It's like rewraping the same fruitcake and giving it back next Christmas to the people who gave it to YOU. Who'll know? They likely didn't make it themselves, anyway, but got it from somebody else...

Perhaps we could award a WR barnstar for finally leaving WP further ones for staying off-wiki for 3, 6 and 12 months.

Or maybe offer a 12-step program for "Wikipedics Anonymous"

Wikipedia's tolerance of vandalism has been framed as necessary to encourage anon editors. This is false, an example of a simpler and more effective solution to anon vandalism is as follows:

1) allow any established registered editor (say with more than 1,000 edits) to issue a 24hr block to an anon for vandalism.
2) allow an anon to instantly appeal a 24hr block. If appealed an administrator will either allow the block to stay or prevent the person who issued the block to issue any more blocks.
3) administrators will search for anon's with multiple 24hr blocks and block those with many blocks for longer periods.

Sorry. I meant Guy Chapman (aka JzG on Wikipedia). He went to ED to see if I had more edits there than on WP (which I didn't) and saw that I had made some comments on the talk page of their Grawp article and used this to imply that I was aiding Grawp's vandalism on Wikipedia. When I questioned him about this accusation on his talk page, he reverted my comment as vandalism. He obviously didn't bother to read the comments on Grawp, as I made them when I first went to ED and they were comments saying that we had Grawp's IP and could rat him out to his ISP (at the time I was off on a foolish anti-vandalism crusade, but I've since come to my senses and also found out that Grawp is actually a decent sort of chap.)

"Hi, my name is Milton."
"Hi, Milton!"
"Uh, it's been 3 hours since my last Wikipedia edit."
Silence.
"Well, you bastards, it's harder for some of us than others!!! "

Lots of people turn up drunk to their first AA meeting. Its normal.

Garbagemen do pretty well, I've heard. Benefits, job security, and I've even seen trucks where all the can-lifting and emptying is automated.

And you almost never have to work nights...

I think Miltown has it confused with Confession.

Lotsa people turn up drunk to Confession.

On both sides of the screen.

Jon

Miltown! Oh, that was low. And it dates you.

I'm glad I see a smiley there, Guy. I was writing all that in hopes (expectation?) that you would crack a smile. I'm relentlessly advertising that money-making venture of mine, aren't I?!

I dated a guy, just before attending my first year of college, whose family was in the garbage collection business. They were very well off. Multi-millionaires, in fact. Just one account, (a large amusement park), alone incurred about a million dollars a year in trash/garbage removal. That was many years ago, too.

Just think of the kind of money the gargage collection owner that has the Disneyland/World account makes from that one alone, today.

I guess it's literally true of that saying, "one man's garbage, is another man's cash crop." As they trot off smiling, and smelling, all the way to the bank. lol

~ Better Dating Through Carbon 14 ~

Jon

Maybe we could have some sort of formal policy, whereby we say that it's OK for members to link to, and to some extent even promote, their own commercial websites - as long as they don't do so in the context of telling yet another member that they're likely to be chided in some way for having done essentially the same thing, knowing the whole time that they probably wouldn't be...?

I mean, it seems like a reasonable compromise to me, under the circumstances anyway.



You wanna talk about the... real junk?

I think a better policy is that Anonymous Writers Shut The Φυχ Up about COI issues altogether.

Jon

COI issues with regard to posting here on WR, or COI issues in general? There's no need to impose overt chilling-effect policies as a general rule... Besides, you know as well as anyone that it's much harder to shut people up completely than it is to get them to accept reasonable limitations in the spirit of general cooperation, blah blah blah.

I am talking about the forms of peer critique that can be pursued with all due fairness among the members of this body and the forms of peer critique that become a contradiction in terms the instant they start.

Judgments of COI are not absolute, and not all conflicts of interest involve financial interests.

You may be able to judge that A's interest in X conflicts with the collective interest in Z far more than B's interest in Y does, but you can do that only if you know the identities and interests in question.

One of the most reprehensible aspects of Wikipedia is the ability of people with non-disclosed identities to berate people with disclosed identities over the most petty of potential conflicts that the accusers have no obligation to come clean on themselves. A great deal of the abuse that we discuss here arises from that uncivil idiotsyncrasy of Wikipedism.

I think that needs to stop.

For all I know, Guy could be Jimbo Wales his own self, greasing his wikipalm with every link he wikipastes to Wikipedia. Until he is willing to verify who he is, and thus who he's not, he is not a peer of others who have.

Western civilization has this policy about stating your name or getting your butt out of the jury box.

Works for me.

Jon

I can certainly vouch for Guy to the extent that he's just a regular sort of fellow with no financial interest in anything WP-related, and certainly he's not Jimbo (though he may be his pet Weimaraner, of course. All of us could be).

Beyond that, I guess I agree with you... Then again, I'm pretty much anonymous myself, so what do I know?

Did you know that the holes in the Swiss Cheese are very low in calories?

Amen. It's been a month since I quit. The FA that I wrote is declining, templates that I maintained are attracting bugs, and I don't care. I thought it would be harder to stop (yes, it can be addictive at times), but the instant that I quit made things a lot simpler and clearer.

You dated AJ Soprano?


Scary.

I knew, but I didn't want to be accused "cheese-spamming."

Dang, this is the second time I've contributed to the derailing of this thread, and it's hardly even two pages. Let's go back to the original post, which might have been improved by the addition of line breaks, so I added a couple of 'em:

My question is, is this reflective of a general trend among RC Patrollers, who have been told for literally years that technical methods of preventing WP vandalism would be implemented "soon"?

It's getting more clear with each passing RfA that mere vandal-fighting is no longer enough to gain adminship, which is probably the reward that most non-writer RC patrollers are after. I'd imagine that there are plenty of RC patrollers who are also good writers, but given the amount of time required, I would think the trend is towards significantly less patrolling activity, isn't it?

If they don't implement some form of edit-approval strategy by year-end, how bad will it get? Will everybody get fed up and stop contributing, given that their earlier contributions are going to be increasingly open to corruption that the developers show insufficient interest in trying to stop?

The crazy thing is that the vast majority of "vandalism" is contributed by IP editors who have actually been invited to edit Wikipedia.

Suppose that, socially, no one was willing to repair vandalism. Would the project allow every article to be hopelessly vandalized by IPs until Wikipedia was completely useless?

What vandal fighters are actually doing is allowing anonymous IPs to edit by suppressing outcomes which would otherwise be intolerable.

The irony is that those who've spent a lot of time reverting anons might be the first to agree that anon editing of mainspace should be disabled, yet their thankless efforts may well forestall it from happening.

Semiprotection should be applied liberally, anywhere there is a known problem, and on all biographies of the living by default.

But it was Alaric the Goth who had previously sacked Rome, in 410.

All in all, Rome was sacked seven times from 387 BCE to 1527 CE. That's a lot of sacks.

I recall looking this up once, in the aftermath of 9/11. I think it was Alaric who only attacked the government buildings and the banks, leaving the temples and cultural centers alone. The connection to 9/11 was interesting, because on that occasion, Osama bin Laden attacked the Twin Temples of Mammon and Chronos and the Temple of Mars, the symbols of Economic Hegemony and Military Hegemony.

Homo Ludens Juvenensis have their Pokemons.

Homo Politicus Idioticus have their Hegemons.

For all I know, Jon could be. Yes, he's posted a name, but so what? Suppose I tell you Guy's real name is Guy Goodwin, and even change his account's name to that. How would you disprove it?

Have to pretty much agree here.

I never really did recent changes patrolling on Wikipedia. One reason was because I didn't feel it was my responsibility, because while writing content and debating and voting on Wikipedia I still attest can actually be enjoyable, reverting vandalism could never be. Another reason was because I didn't actually know how recent changes patrol works. You do have to use a special program to do RC patrolling effectively, right? And I sure as hell was never gonna install a stupid program just to clean up the mess left behind by idiots who shouldn't be editing WP anyway.

Oh by the way, could you respond to some of the points I made in my thread that is in The Lounge subforum here? I'd like to hear what you have to say to some of them.




"[I] found out that Grawp is actually a decent sort of chap" - Urban Rose



Call my sense of humour immature and stupid if you like, but Grawp's vandalism makes me lol pretty much every time.

And are these (it's a tinyurl link, but trust me, it's not nimp.org, it's because the sockpuppet had a "." in the username making the URL impossible to link to) the words of a "decent sort of chap"? I know that when he's on ED he's perfectly civil and normal towards users there, but on Wikipedia, he turns into a beast. All that stuff about "warm, sticky cum fountains" that he's been posting recently could actually be taken as rape threats. We all know that Grawp's not serious, but if someone did take these seriously, you never know what could happen.

For all we know, thekohser could be Jimbo Wales, and mentioning viable alternative models of wiki media every now and then is just his devious way of throwing us off the scent.

The POINT of my POINT being — and we all know how POINTFUL that can be — that it's pretty Φreekin' POINTLESS talking about COI in such a setting, except in GENERIC, SYSTEMATIC, VERIFIABLE terms.

Now see what you did? You've gone and made a CAPITALIST out of me …

Jon

I've talked to two Wikipedians by telephone, and several others by Skype voice. One gets so much more information about a person by listening to the melody of their voice (as compared to hallucinating the sound of their voice from interpreting typed text).