This hasn't really been mentioned on WR yet, but the abuse filter is shortly going live (see Wikipedia:Abuse filter). Any thoughts?

Is it a good thing, is it bad? Will it have any noticeable effect or just make vandals even better? Will it stop Grawp? Is expending so much time on dealing with the obvious vandalism the best use of people's time, or should more effort be made to combat the sneakier stuff?

This seems like a great idea to me. It will almost certainly result in Total Wiki-Paralysis in very short order.

And that's a good thing.

Jon

Like most technology, it is value-neutral. Its overall effect for good or ill will depend on who puts it to use and with what intentions. I have no doubt that it will be misused by WP admins in short order, and represent another hidden level of control and system-gaming. Let's see, how about a hidden rule saying that User:PalestineRemembered can't edit any article with the word "Israel" in it?

Concur with Somey. Werdna is a good guy and a good programmer, but no programming however gifted can cure the defects in Wikipedia's culture. This tool, like any tool, can be abused, and it's a matter of time before it is abused.

Should be interesting to watch. One interesting feature of the design is that most of its operational parameters, as well as its log, are kept hidden, so it will be much easier for someone to try to sneak in inappropriate rules. Expect much wrangling over who gets the assorted permissions.

This... seems interesting. Its basically an institutionalization of the various anti-vandal bots unless I'm misunderstanding (VoABot, ClueBot, etc.) with a hard filter?

Excuse me, Ms. Freud, your slip is showing.

Somey, gomi, they sound the same when you're not thinking very carefully.

Yawn.

Nothing can or will redeem Wikipedia. Too bad, it's just one of those facts of life. Too many trollers, too many "trolling admins", too many pov-pushers, too many tag-team gangs. Too much Jimbo Mimbo. Too bad I haven't anything more positive to say, but these are the facts! Sorry.

If it helps, I concur with Gomi...

At least admin access to the logs/rules.

Yah, we know.

Question is - what are you going to do now? Having free rein on a wiki with nobody to oppose you in any way is going to get ... well, boring really fast. What can you do now that you've not already done?

They're It's heeere....

So, now the "uncensored" "encyclopedia" is now going to be censored.....
by hidden censors. GENIUS!!!

Grawp's plan is reaching new heights of success.

What is this going to do to the editing of items like Cock and Faggot?.......

It's not working right. They've created and deployed a shitton of filters without testing them first.

Is there any defined methodology for testing filters before implementing them? It's not like Wikipedia has a "staging" platform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=278245888

Oh, I don't know... maybe deploying a couple filters or so and letting them run a couple days before plowing full-speed ahead with every conceivable filter possible? Just a thought.

Also, I saw a link earlier (though for the life of me, I can't find the diff now) where there was an edit with "[[NAWLINWIKI’S INDIAN ANUS IS STRETCHED AND WIDENED BY GRAWP’S MASSIVE COCK.]]" and the warning, according to the IRC bot feed, was for "shouting".

Awesome.

[Edit] Here it is. Please, someone tell me I'm too blonde to understand this without detailed explanations, and that it doesn't look how I think it does.

Well, the idea I have is that they should have a test corpus of edits (perhaps a saved sample of typical editing behavior) that proposed rules can be run against and checked at least for false positives. That seems like it wouldn't be that hard to implement.

But it seems that anybody with the political savvy to wheedle the permissions bits can create any rule they want, based only on their stunning intellect, and implement it without any process whatsoever. How typically Wikipedian.

These comments assume that if there's a way to game the system at WP, it will be attempted. It reflects a darker view of human nature than what's implicit in official Wikipedia culture, especially as reflected in policies & guidelines. How cynical! How pessimistic! How ... well you've nailed it. There should be a block of granite somewhere where we can chisel the words "Any tool can be abused, and it's a matter of time before it is abused. "

You're too blonde to understand this without detailed explanations, and it doesn't look how you think it does.

Hope that helps.

Piffle. Grawp is the beta tester.
And he works for free.

Oh yeah, this is gonna be fun.....the log is exploding. Already up to 5-15
filterings per minute, after only a few hours of operation.
How many are false positives? We might never know for certain....

Wikipedia's history supports this thesis.

It's like watching that scene in THX 1138, you know the one …

By The Numbers …

OMG!

Ja Ja

Wow. I vote we take this incredible filter and set it to only allow IP edits if they have an edit count greater than 10, emailed confirmed status, and an account age greater than 4 days. We could even apply stricter filtering for Tor proxy IPs: maybe 90 days and 100 edits. Yeah.

Then: apply this filter to all BLPs, just for a test, and see what happens. If it works, apply it not only to all BLPs, but to all articles except those that start with Z.

abuse filter editors

user right logs (can admins give themselves permissions?)

example Filter

history for said example

I think that's already been tried:

Wow. Almost as if he was distracted by somebody stretching and widening his Indian anus.

NawlinWiki fucks up in similar fashion with the title blacklist all the time. I'd just bully them off all technical pages, but it's good comedy.

Yeah, this is going to be fun... I predict we will see a lot of over-zealous filters that will make things harder for everyone except the in crowd. Remember that for most vandal patrollers, bot operators and ANI junkies, newbies are expendable, and creating difficulties for them is no big deal.

There are already some dubious filters... for example, non-admins are now prohibited from removing the Virgin Killer album cover of IWF fame. Users with too few edits cannot add large blocks of text without wikilinks to articles. Also, lots of editing restrictions are being added to non-autoconfirmed accounts without any discussion whatsoever (one such filter prohibited non-autoconfirmed from changing the target of a redirect, but was disabled for performance reasons). Another filter that was added during the testing phase but later removed was called "RfA Anti-NOTNOW" and prohibited users with less than a certain number of edits from creating a Request for Adminship. I think we are going to see lots of these types of filters being added.

Also, filters can be set to private, preventing the trigger conditions from being seen by non-admins. Just think of all the abuse that can come from that. "Your edit was disallowed by the filter called 'anti-trolling'. Details of what caused the filter to trigger are hidden". The filter NawlinWiki added that de-autoconfirmed everyone making an edit during a two-minute period was such a hidden filter. (As already mentioned, NawlinWiki is constantly adding over-broad entries to the title blacklist, there have been over 10 incidents where he has blocked all page moves, or blocked creation of all articles containing the letter "r", and similar screwups). Yep, this is definitely going to be fun.

The real problem here isn't that these things are possible. A technical rule that prevented people with less than n edits from creating an RfA would be fine—provided that rule had been decided upon by an appropriately deliberative process and had the general consent of the community. But that's not what happens here. Instead, anybody who manages to wrangle the appropriate privileges can implement any rule they feel like, and the only review is ex post facto. If a rule goes unnoticed for long enough, or the person backing it is politically powerful enough, it'll stand even if it is remarkably stupid.

What we can all hope is that someone manages to tie the entire system up in so many knots that people start leaving in droves, enough so that recruitment isn't enough to maintain critical mass. Once Wikipedia loses the critical mass that keeps them going, they'll very rapidly disintegrate. This tool, and the ease with which it can be abused, may be the best prospect for speeding the death of Wikipedia to come down the pike in quite some time.

Slightly ironic as this is the guy who keeps fucking up the title blacklist to prevent page creations/moves containing something as trivial as a specific letter.

His editing there indicates a pattern of ownership and incompetence. Fixing his mistakes has become a full-time job for other admins:
Brian Peppers, but only with a quotation mark two positions after the "s"
anything containing the letter "p"
The letter "R"
"HA" or "GG"
The poor man's elipsis "..."
err why not just lock the database when you go to bed
another day in paradise
No silver bullet
parenthesis ")" 1–49 spaces after an apostrophe "’" or "'"
etc.
etc.
etc.

At least this new toy is keeping the children happy.

NawlinWiki needs to be banned from the project. Not just to end the ridiculous and incessant errors that cause extra work for active admins and often lock the system down, but for his own sanity. Clearly he does not have the personality to deal with the harassment his editing has caused him, because you can see from his contributions that he constantly freaking out.

The true purpose of the new so-called abuse filter has now been revealed. It's to scare off newcomers.

That's just the cold filter.

It's extraordinary that nobody seems to be concerned about these kids playing with regular expressions they don't understand, making up new policies via their (secret) filters as they each see fit, without any apparent discussion whatsoever.

The lunatics have finally found the key to the asylum.

"I was so poor growing up, if I wasn't born a boy I'd have nothing to play with." -- Rodney Dangerfield

As does Heywood Jablome.

There are currently 74 filters and a dozen or so of them are seekrit, viewable only by admins who have given themselves the key.

You can view the logs of the hidden ones if you handcraft the URL.

Hidden filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/71
Viewable log of hidden filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Abuse...&wpSearchTitle=

Strangely, none of the abuse filter logs are viewable if you try to access them through a proxy.
Abuse filter is just another example of Wikipedia teens playing Calvin ball.

Ooops. Yes, we've given the children keys to the secret superduper keeper-outer replicator robots.



But doesn't it tickle your fancy a bit to think of Nawlin toiling away constructing filters to prevent creation of all page titles containing "STRETCHED AND WIDENED" or "MASSIVE"?

And meanwhile.......

the result looks less and less like an "encyclopedia".

I might point out this article. It's poorly written, and leaves a lot of information out.
And it's also ignored...........perhaps because it doesn't have huge tits.

This is completely expected. A filter's performance ought to be reviewable by everyone, even if the exact logic of the filter isn't.

Viewing the performance should be allowed to everyone, yes.

But the first URL ought not to work if you are J random editor... it should only work for those authorised to modify abuse filters, or at least only for admins. I tried it with my non admin (fully disclosed and crosslinked for those keeping score at home) sock and that first URL shows me nothing except a "you are not authorised" screen. Working as Designed.

Perhaps Tarantino is an admin? I don't think it's broken but I could be wrong.

We should be talking about this on wiki, cue a lecture from Jon or GBG about that...

Tru dat.

NawlinWiki was found to be a total lolcow. The admins that get sucked in by the trolling the most and get angry and overreact, like him (and others such as Jeske Couriano) are the biggest fools.


Yeah, it's hilarious.

But what would NawlinWiki do without his Wikipedia? If he was desysopped or indeed community banned, it'd probably have a highly adverse effect on his life as a whole...

I often wonder about NawlinWiki... like how old is he? What else does he do with his life other than edit Wikipedia? He's a curious one...



Yeah, she is pretty hot actually. I've kinda always thought that ever since I first saw Lucy Pinder on the cover of a magazine in like 2004.

And just why in the hell can't I see it?



It's a crappy design serving no other purpose but to create another separate "clique" - there's no more legitimate reason not to let all admins do this than there is for the spam filter / title blacklist / any other technical stuff.

---

The other question this raises is why I couldn't see the supposedly "publicly viewable" description at that url. And just why is that implementation private anyway?

Oh, did you want to see it?



But of course, that's just a guess...

That's a good guess. The filter triggers on long edit summaries that are not page-moves. The description of the filter is probably meant to mirror its primary purpose, but long edit summaries can indicate bad news, or alternatively a thorough explanation - I've seen both. It's thus possible to trigger the filter without logging in or doing any pagemoves.

The low editcount seems correct.

The sysop exemption seems unlikely to be present because the low edit count already exempts admins (with the possible exception of lustiger_seth) and the programmers would not insert superfluous code into the task.

A poorly written filter disabled new account creation for nearly 20 minutes.

It seems "test before enabling" is lost on some.