User talk:61.8.12.133

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Rack off with your sock-puppet flags...

No evidence is presented, did you check the contributions? They go back a year and cover areas completely unrelated to David's work.

Now I can see where Wikipedia is going, thanks for making that clear to me you have expanded my perspective of the world and increased my distrust in human nature.

I'm looking at the list [Suspected Socks] and I can see that the list was compiled in such a way that any old edit was added to the list with no care or scrutiny. I'll make an effort to check the list myself.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)

Contents

[edit] Sock?

Assuming your story about being 'a friend' of community banned User:DavidYork71 is true, my suggestion is to read WP:MEAT. Also, maybe have a look hereand here. Happy to discuss further if necessary. Merbabu 23:40, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Whitewash

I'm largely talking to myself here because the people who would benefit from listening are least likely to be interested. Anyhow, I'm collecting a list of the "whitewash" edits that I happen to notice. That is to say, edits designed to eliminate information from Wikipedia where someone happens to be uncomfortable with that information. Another name for it might be "censorship" but usually censorship is overt and this is more subtle than that.

So far I only have one example, it's hard work munging through edit histories and there are better things to do but no doubt I will stumble upon more of the same and grow the list a bit.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)

[edit] Fact tag on "punished", trying to get an image deleted

The use of [citation needed] tags against absolutely obvious statements is quite common. Should the editor be required to find an expert in child psychology to get a written statement that chaining a child to a heavy log is a form of punishment? I personally regard certain facts as self-evident. Also, the speedy delete tag for the image -- anyone who had checked the image at the time would have seen that suitable Copyright statement and attribution already existed, so the speedy-delete tag was placed at best carelessly, at worst disingenuously -- either way it was an attempt to eliminate information.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)


[edit] Sock Philosophy

Still talking to myself... there is a clear problem with the Wikipedia design in that they attempt to ban users but also attempt to detect people who sidestep the ban by just creating more accounts. There's a fundamental contradiction in being "The Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit Except when We Decide they Can't Except When They Actually Can.

The first problem... no one really knows who is controlling what and how. Some cases are really blatent, others are vague and everything in the middle crops up.

One example is the attempt to get Arrow booted because of solicitations for outsiders to join Wikipedia and start reverting edits. It's an interesting example because there is some evidence that various people are joining Wikipedia just for the purpose of winning edit wars. Then again, why not? It happens everywhere you look -- uncritical thinkers following John Howard or Jesus or Microsoft and making their vote count in both political and economic terms. On what basis does Wikipedia believe that they can hold themselves to a different standard as the rest of human existance?

If wikipedia admins hit the socks too hard then you are guaranteed of clobbering someone innocent who is then going to hold a grudge and it is rapidly going downhill from there. If you go easy on the socks then a ban becomes a largely symbolic action to no great purpose. Frankly, there's a massive overlap between those two thresholds where the smart, banned users can easily sidestep the ban at the same time as the green noobs get clobbered for being a sock as soon as they buy into a poisoned discussion.

Another example is User:One_Elephant_went_out_to_play... who was first banned by a robot for having something wrong with his username but no one could figure out what exactly was wrong so the ban was lifted. Bit of a bad start, could happen to anyone.

Then he edited a bunch of random stuff, mostly car related.

Then he got into an argument with User:Bastique over this revert (and page protection that later followed). Probably would have been smarter to let the matter drop but User:SlimVirgin and User:Steel359 got involved. Probably the single edit that best describes the situation is here where User:Bastique points out that ultimately who you are is what matters and some editors just get more weight than others. I can't help feeling that this defeats most of the purpose of Wikipedia and brings us right back to the academic ivory towers that have served us in the past -- new media converts itself into old media.

The ultimate upshot was that User:One_Elephant_went_out_to_play... figured it was all too hard and gave up the struggle. He/She tried to leave a "last word" comment to explain that his/her reason for leaving was that admins do not follow procedure. it seems that such comments are not allowed and then the sockpuppet flag came along as User:Steel359 decided that this person who had been driven away by a dispute must really be someone else.

Now, having placed the flag, User:Steel359 uses this as ammunition against User:Enviroknot by updating the ban to a date one year after One Elephant tried to leave his/her "last words".

I personally can't see the similarity between User:One_Elephant_went_out_to_play... and User:Enviroknot but maybe others will see something. It's a guessing game really. I don't believe that the current system is working well and I can see that Wikipedia is starting to fall apart a bit.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)

[edit] Signing posts

Here's me thinking that no one was reading... I figured that since you archived off my earlier comments after admitting you were wrong (no apology but I don't care about that) the discussion was over. since then I've been doing a lot of reading just to get an idea of how things work and putting notes here for want of a better place. Sorry if there's some auto-bot that copies these comments into some other space, I'll move them if that helps. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)

[edit] On anons

I assume this was aimed in my direction. Please note that I "blasted" no one. I simply stated the truth: that on Wikipedia, for good or ill, people with names are given a pass a lot more often than those editing "anonymously" from IP addresses. It's not as if there isn't good reason, when you think about it.

The moniker "61.8.12.133" looks a lot like the "name" of the guy I sent to WP:AIV for repeatedly replacing the article on his university with the word "poop," even though the IPs are not, in fact, the same. Whether through nurture or nature, we humans are a lot more likely to learn to trust a name (since a prerequisite to building trust is memory of past actions) than a string of numbers, in the same fashion we recall what a wombat is called with significantly more ease than we remember π or e out to the umpteenth decimal. It's not as if all usernames are trusted, but at least we can quickly identify, in most cases, whether or not a name-bearer is someone who can be trusted than we can with an IP address. --Dynaflow 08:59, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Woha! Easy there... I was not saying that you "blasted" anyone (or even trying to suggest that). Indeed, it's just something that I see happening a lot out there and the preceding discussion brought it to mind. Like I mentioned, it happens off Wikipedia too in blogs all over the place. I fully understand that humans have an affinity for names over numbers but I'm also pointing out that although names are more comforting they are really no safer (they just give an illusion of being safe). Usually the illusion of safety is more dangerous than obvious danger.
I also notice on Wikipedia a trend to trust names over IPs without any additional checking whatsoever. I would put this as further example of the illusion of security and editors being susceptible to that illusion for the reasons that you mention. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)
You'd be surprised. When I do recent-changes patrolling and I see something questionable being done by either an anon or a registered user, I'll look into their discussion history and contribs to look for signs of past vandalism or other malfeasance, such as the account being used for a single purpose (e.g. redacting articles on Scientology). Additionally, for anons, even if they haven't made bad edits in the past, I'll still run a WHOIS to make sure they're not on a shared school IP or something else that could be used by many users, good and bad (another reason to get a unique user ID). For example, before spending the time to write out a response to you, I looked at your contributions and your Talk page and ran a WHOIS (How's the weather Down Under?) to make sure you were a serious editor and not just some random troll.
The thing with the unique IDs is that, for users who are all over the place, like admins, recent-change and new-page patrollers, and many of the more "prolific" editors, they start to recognize certain usernames as making consistently good edits, and they will always give them the benefit of the doubt right off the bat. Other usernames are recognized as being helpful-but-inept, some others as socks, yet others as trolls, and so on. The IPs, though, are always the same user, "Anon," and most of that user's edits range in quality from bad to worse. If you don't believe me, camp out at Special:Recentchanges for a while. --Dynaflow 10:27, 7 May 2007 (UTC)


I'm sure you do check carefully, FWIW I think User:Netsnipe is an excellent admin too (just my opinion). From tying to get my head around the history of User:One_Elephant_went_out_to_play... (see above) I can well understand how difficult it is to navigate the history and the talk pages. It took me literally all day reading to puzzle out as much as I did and I'm probably still missing some of the story... I would expect that by the time you get admin privs you can navigate faster than the average editor but still the admins have a massive task on their hands. I can also respect that User:Netsnipe gives his real name and PGP key -- he is a very rare non-anon user. The WHOIS on my IP tells you I'm in Australia (or the IP is anyhow) but that won't tell you if it's shared or not (you can sometimes be sure it IS shared but never sure that it ISN'T). Actually, someone who knows what they are doing could probably find my real name, I'm not trying all that hard to protect it -- just putting up a small barrier to keep out the rif-raf.
You comment regarding Special:Recentchanges is a little unfair, I did a quick straw-poll and found: good probably good good not sure good good bad good good probably good -- only one obviously bad edit... that's just from a random sampling of the page (maybe I got lucky). I would still think that Wikipedia is getting useful input from people who don't login.
I'm also coming to the conclusion that the current policy system is putting up an impossible task for the admins to try to achieve. Maybe (and I'm not really convinced) forcing everyone to create an account would make the admin's job easier. When you think about the difficulty of discriminating a clever sockpuppet as-against a new user who stumbles into trouble, and the amount of research required to have a good hit rate... well it's a mugs game really, the admins can't win. Even more of a problem when you get tightly organised groups of editors who really are separate people but coordinate their edits (and you really can't stop people doing that, nor is it obvious that they should be stopped). The bigger Wikipedia gets, the more of a target it is for people who are really determined to POV push. I think that right now Wikipedia is depending on the fact that MOST of the random edits are good edits. As the pressure on the admins grows, some will get lazy, others will give up, others will get hair-trigger and ultra aggressive... and the determined POV pushers know exactly how to exploit all of those things. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)

I realized as soon as I sent off my message that it was the wrong time of night to watch recent changes for vandals. Most of the IPvandalism I see coming in is from the US (and to a lesser extent, Canada), which is unsurprising given that the plurality of English Wikipedia edits currently seem to originate in the United States. Unlike me, most Americans are diurnal creatures, and this goes for bored teenagers as well as bored/unstable/vengeful/malicious adults, the usual suspects. If you're up for it, watch Recent Changes around the early afternoon, Pacific Daylight Time (start around 22:00 ZULU or so), as Americans and Canadians collectively start to grow more and more bored at work and school, with people on the East Coast getting ready to go home and people on the West Coast starting to get antsy. I share your concerns, though.

Identity on Wikipedia is a rather difficult thing. Four admins got desysopped today when their accounts got hacked, and no one can figure out how to give sysop privileges back to the people who claim they are the administrators in question, locked out of their accounts. Wikipedia is a strange planet. --Dynaflow 06:20, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your recent edits

Hi, there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button Image:Wikisigbutton.png located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot 06:32, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

May I humbly suggest that after all the effort of writing a signer bot, you could leave neat and clean signatures behind (maybe do something clever like copy the first user signature found on their talk page or something). I mean, the idea of machines is to do the work of humans, no? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.8.12.133 (talk • contribs)

[edit] December 2007

Your recent edit to YCbCr (diff) was reverted by an automated bot. The edit was identified as adding either test edits, vandalism, or link spam to the page or having an inappropriate edit summary. If you want to experiment, please use the preview button while editing or consider using the sandbox. If this revert was in error, please contact the bot operator. If you made an edit that removed a large amount of content, try doing smaller edits instead. Thanks! // VoABot II (talk) 23:38, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks? Why are you thanking me? What are you thanking me for? And what is it with everyone going on about the sandbox? I totally fail to see why constantly mentioning the sandbox somehow lends weight to a decision. May I also suggest that if you are going to identify people's edits as something bad, then tell them precisely what was bad about the edit and why. Giving a long list of vague and arbitrary things that MAY have been identified as a problem is totally lame and rather useless junk to fill space and waste time.