User:Equazcion/sandbox2/Archive110

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 * Well, I take your point, about personal responsibility, and so on. But I've been a student, so let us do a thought experiment.  Assume we have an average classroom of 10 students (please ignore the validity of this round number as an indicator of real-world average student-teacher ratios!), in the hard-nosed statistical sense of the word:  half the students are below average for the country, half are above average.  The best student in the class is 90th percentile on their SAT, the worst student in the class is 10th percentile, *that* sort of statistically average.  How many of our ten kids will have an interest in reading wikipedia?  Well, many of them, it has info about math, but also bands, videogames, teevee, porn, et cetera.  How many will want to constructively edit?  Given the pop-culture stuff, we might hope for 4 out of 10, but that is probably wildly optimistic.  How many will want to vandalize?  At least one, given my dim view of the statistical American.  Perhaps even two.  Can the visigoth (or pair of Vandals maybe) do so much damage, that the IP is blocked, and wikipedia loses the possibility of *any* of the ten students contributing?  Indubitably.  So your proposal basically boils down to this:  the vandal, with *no* consequence to themselves (school principals do not enforce the five pillars on students after all) can keep the geeks, brainiacs, and so on from editing wikipedia.  The folks that care about pop-culture can find it in other places, like facebook or googleplus or the websites of the artists or whatnot.
 * To put it as bluntly as I can, are you expecting the shy nerdy girl who loves learning about math by editing wikipedia, to organize her peers into a clique, and socially shun the vandal, until editing access to wikipedia is restored for her school? The valuable life lesson here is, bad people in my school get away with doing bad things, and the people I *thought* were on my side at wikipedia let it happen.  Maybe the shy girl, our heroine, will edit wikipedia from home, or from a library with another IP, or figure out to register an account.  But maybe not.  And that is beside the point:  I want the shy girl to be editing wikipedia *at* school, so that she can update the articles about videogames/bands/teevee, and impress her friends.  Some might be impressed enough to edit, if the formerly shy girl shows them how.  Anyways, I'm not trying to say you are wrong.  You have a definite point.  But rather than punish the class/school/campus as a group, why not just block the vandal?  We can.  As soon as one bad edit shows up, block the PC, using a cookie, for 10 minutes, then 20, then 40, then 80, and so on.  Vandals in junior high are unlikely to be smart enough to get around even *that* simple of a technology, in my experience.  Why block the IP of all students indefinitely, when we can just temp-block the vandal?  74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:13, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

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 * @74.192.84.101 - We aren't paid, you know. We don't have time to keep spreadsheets, do 5 minute blocks and see if they've worked, etc. And most of us like to send time actually improving articles, not just blocking. I'm sorry, that wouldn't work. There are times when I think blocking schools on sight isn't a bad idea. And I wish it were the case that we revert all their vandalism. Dougweller (talk) 15:21, 28 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Waitaminute. Are you telling me I'm not getting paid for this, either??  Curse you, Jimbo Wales, and your fiendish spacebar key too!!   :-)   Yes.  I know you are not paid for this, Doug, in the traditional sense.  But we *are* rewarded for our time here on wikipedia.  There is the satisfaction of editing, sure.  That provides us with personal pride in craftsmanship, and provides readers with useful knowledge.  And there is the little bump we get when people thank us for our efforts, so allow me to say, thanks for your hard work.  It is appreciated.  But I'm after bigger fish here, and I think you would like to catch some of these fish, too, if I can convince you they are in fact feasible to catch.
 * I want more editors, and more admins. Lots more.  See WP:RETENTION.  I'm having a conversation over on another talkpage with Besieged, who is a wikiCop using huggle to revert vandalism:  1000 this month, and another 1000 last month.  They aren't an admin, yet anyways; they just want to help.  (I have not asked if they realize there is no hazard pay involved!)  But there are a lot of false-positives, which bites the beginners.  He rushes from fire to fire, and does not have time to review each carefully.  He has no time for spreadsheets, either.  We need better automated tools, which 'magically' perform the steps we'd like them to do.  Blocking IPs is too damn granular; see my sob story above, about the 10-to-20-percents of students that *would* edit from time to time, if only we let them.  I'm not suggesting we switch from huggle to excel, or from range-blocks to excel, I'm suggesting that we improve huggle, and improve the blocking-tools, to automagically Do The Right Thing.  Fewer false-poz incidents from huggle, and less time range-blocking an IP, will both result in *more* editors, which means more admins/wikiCops/etc to fight the vandalism.  We have 500M uniques, and 0.1M sometime-editors.  We need it to be 5M, if we want to have a hope of stopping effectively *all* the vandalism... and we are shooting ourselves in the foot, when we block schools on first sighting.  Why not hold off on blocking a vandal, until we see the whites of their eyes?  Especially if doing so means we shoot less civilians by accident, and in turn they remain editors, and swell the pool of anti-vandal gunslingers... this is the sort of positive feedback loop I'm trying to get people interesting in building with me.  74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:13, 19 October 2013 (UTC)


 * As an alternative, I would like to see a way to add IP addresses or maybe even a block of IP addresses to my watch list, preferably with some automatic expiration time. That way, having encountered vandalism from an IP,  I could easily monitor if the vandal was still active and revert or block as appropriate. In a school setting it is typically one kid who is being a problem and they quickly lose interest if they are promptly and consistently reverted. Meanwhile a student or teacher making constructive edits from the same IP will not get discouraged.--agr (talk) 19:50, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

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 * @74.192.84.101 - We aren't paid, you know. We don't have time to keep spreadsheets, do 5 minute blocks and see if they've worked, etc. And most of us like to send time actually improving articles, not just blocking. I'm sorry, that wouldn't work. There are times when I think blocking schools on sight isn't a bad idea. And I wish it were the case that we revert all their vandalism. Dougweller (talk) 15:21, 28 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Waitaminute. Are you telling me I'm not getting paid for this, either??  Curse you, Jimbo Wales, and your fiendish spacebar key too!!   :-)   Yes.  I know you are not paid for this, Doug, in the traditional sense.  But we *are* rewarded for our time here on wikipedia.  There is the satisfaction of editing, sure.  That provides us with personal pride in craftsmanship, and provides readers with useful knowledge.  And there is the little bump we get when people thank us for our efforts, so allow me to say, thanks for your hard work.  It is appreciated.  But I'm after bigger fish here, and I think you would like to catch some of these fish, too, if I can convince you they are in fact feasible to catch.
 * I want more editors, and more admins. Lots more.  See WP:RETENTION.  I'm having a conversation over on another talkpage with Besieged, who is a wikiCop using huggle to revert vandalism:  1000 this month, and another 1000 last month.  They aren't an admin, yet anyways; they just want to help.  (I have not asked if they realize there is no hazard pay involved!)  But there are a lot of false-positives, which bites the beginners.  He rushes from fire to fire, and does not have time to review each carefully.  He has no time for spreadsheets, either.  We need better automated tools, which 'magically' perform the steps we'd like them to do.  Blocking IPs is too damn granular; see my sob story above, about the 10-to-20-percents of students that *would* edit from time to time, if only we let them.  I'm not suggesting we switch from huggle to excel, or from range-blocks to excel, I'm suggesting that we improve huggle, and improve the blocking-tools, to automagically Do The Right Thing.  Fewer false-poz incidents from huggle, and less time range-blocking an IP, will both result in *more* editors, which means more admins/wikiCops/etc to fight the vandalism.  We have 500M uniques, and 0.1M sometime-editors.  We need it to be 5M, if we want to have a hope of stopping effectively *all* the vandalism... and we are shooting ourselves in the foot, when we block schools on first sighting.  Why not hold off on blocking a vandal, until we see the whites of their eyes?  Especially if doing so means we shoot less civilians by accident, and in turn they remain editors, and swell the pool of anti-vandal gunslingers... this is the sort of positive feedback loop I'm trying to get people interesting in building with me.  74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:13, 19 October 2013 (UTC)


 * As an alternative, I would like to see a way to add IP addresses or maybe even a block of IP addresses to my watch list, preferably with some automatic expiration time. That way, having encountered vandalism from an IP,  I could easily monitor if the vandal was still active and revert or block as appropriate. In a school setting it is typically one kid who is being a problem and they quickly lose interest if they are promptly and consistently reverted. Meanwhile a student or teacher making constructive edits from the same IP will not get discouraged.--agr (talk) 19:50, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

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 * Well, I take your point, about personal responsibility, and so on. But I've been a student, so let us do a thought experiment.  Assume we have an average classroom of 10 students (please ignore the validity of this round number as an indicator of real-world average student-teacher ratios!), in the hard-nosed statistical sense of the word:  half the students are below average for the country, half are above average.  The best student in the class is 90th percentile on their SAT, the worst student in the class is 10th percentile, *that* sort of statistically average.  How many of our ten kids will have an interest in reading wikipedia?  Well, many of them, it has info about math, but also bands, videogames, teevee, porn, et cetera.  How many will want to constructively edit?  Given the pop-culture stuff, we might hope for 4 out of 10, but that is probably wildly optimistic.  How many will want to vandalize?  At least one, given my dim view of the statistical American.  Perhaps even two.  Can the visigoth (or pair of Vandals maybe) do so much damage, that the IP is blocked, and wikipedia loses the possibility of *any* of the ten students contributing?  Indubitably.  So your proposal basically boils down to this:  the vandal, with *no* consequence to themselves (school principals do not enforce the five pillars on students after all) can keep the geeks, brainiacs, and so on from editing wikipedia.  The folks that care about pop-culture can find it in other places, like facebook or googleplus or the websites of the artists or whatnot.
 * To put it as bluntly as I can, are you expecting the shy nerdy girl who loves learning about math by editing wikipedia, to organize her peers into a clique, and socially shun the vandal, until editing access to wikipedia is restored for her school? The valuable life lesson here is, bad people in my school get away with doing bad things, and the people I *thought* were on my side at wikipedia let it happen.  Maybe the shy girl, our heroine, will edit wikipedia from home, or from a library with another IP, or figure out to register an account.  But maybe not.  And that is beside the point:  I want the shy girl to be editing wikipedia *at* school, so that she can update the articles about videogames/bands/teevee, and impress her friends.  Some might be impressed enough to edit, if the formerly shy girl shows them how.  Anyways, I'm not trying to say you are wrong.  You have a definite point.  But rather than punish the class/school/campus as a group, why not just block the vandal?  We can.  As soon as one bad edit shows up, block the PC, using a cookie, for 10 minutes, then 20, then 40, then 80, and so on.  Vandals in junior high are unlikely to be smart enough to get around even *that* simple of a technology, in my experience.  Why block the IP of all students indefinitely, when we can just temp-block the vandal?  74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:13, 19 October 2013 (UTC)