User:Equazcion/sandbox2/Archive 106

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 * We've wanted that for 9 years, never got it, but never got told no. See 470. Jackmcbarn (talk) 00:14, 7 October 2013 (UTC)


 * So... that sounds like exactly what I want, or at least, a good portion of what I want -- for starters. ;-)  Is there anything technological preventing it from happening?  Can it be added to Huggle v3?  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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 * Clarification for others: "K-12" refers to primary and secondary schools in several countries (U.S., Australia, etc.). Other countries organize their grades and student ages differently; our "Educational stage" article lists these arrangements by country. Some countries have post-secondary but pre-university schools for students in age ranges such as 16-18 or 18-19; most, but not all, of those also produce mostly vandalism.


 * My general sense is that the vandalism we get from anonymous editors using primary and secondary school IPs far outweighs the positive contributions but I haven't looked at every IP.


 * As you can see above, I'm cautious about getting "out in front" of the community's consensus on anonymous editing and blocking. As an administrator, I have a duty to follow the community's consensus, even if I don't always agree with it -- unless I have an obvious, compelling reason to do otherwise. (Those occasions are rare).


 * I personally like your idea about pre-emptively soft-blocking K-12 IPs but is the community ready for it? I suspect it's not (yet); restricting anonymous editing is anathema to many in our community.


 * You might get stronger support for now behind a rule imposing long (≥1 year) soft-blocks on "K-12ish" schools exceeding some threshold number of warnings and/or blocks with few positive contributions. These are school systems that with a tangible track record of trouble.


 * I wish you'd gotten more responses (pro or con); you've flagged an important problem. Take a look at Centralized discussion; you may want to get a discussion started elsewhere with more visibility.


 * Thanks for raising this issue. -- A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 23:49, 14 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Personally, I don't see a reason to treat Schools any differently from other IPs that cause disruption. Once an IP has gotten blocked the first time, the resumption of disruption from that IP should generally be dealt with by escalating blocks. While I prefer to see 4 warnings before each block, when someone makes a report, the IP has 3 previous blocks for general vandalism, and it is clear they are back at it, there really isn't a point to delaying the next block. That said, there are a vast number of IPs out there, and a dynamic IP vandal is unlikely to stay on the same IP long enough to get the long blocks that a static school IP ends up with. The school IP ends up with the long block not because we have anything against schools, but because we can identify it as a persistent source of vandalism. I would oppose blocks merely because we can trace the IP to a school, but identifying as a school to understand and stop a pattern of vandalism is fine. Monty  845  05:14, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Preemptively blocking all school IPs is harebrained proposal. Abuse response is moribund because it was mainly the work of one editor, who is now vanished/retired. My impression is that most reports were ignored by the ISPs anyway. Someone not using his real name (talk) 20:21, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Strongly oppose blocking presumed-school (i.e. every teacher and every student therein) without 1) blatant *constant* vandalism that is 2) demonstrably *more* troubles being generated than the bots and editors of wikipedia are able to handle in that particular 30-minute timespan. Just because it is N per day, or X good for every Y bad, is of no relevance.  If there is even one good edit coming out of the school a month, *and* our vandalism-mitigation infrastructure can handle the current rate of bad stuff coming from that same school, I'd rather we not block it.  That said, it probably makes sense for wikipedia admins to keep a spreadsheet of potential hotspot IP addresses -- not specifically schools, but just IPs that have at one time or another had been a significant source (purposely fuzzy) of non-constructive edits.  This would encompass spam-servers, vandal-prone schools, and political campaign-staff headquarters-facilities, all in one fell swoop.  Bots could auto-update the list, methinks, including

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colorizing it with detected-revert-percentage-graphs. That should make the world easier for admins. Even when a site has their IP temporarily blocked, I would recommend extreme serenity: first of all, just block editing privs, and just temporarily, i.e. five mins, then 10 mins, then 20 mins, and so on... dialing back down a notch once no vandalism has occurred for the specified period. Even when a block is in place for five mins, rather than *totally* block, just slow down access. Block every other request, for instance. Users doing good faith edits can simply hit retry on their browsers a few times. Vandals enjoying the thrill of rapidly screwing up page after page will get bored, if they keep getting timeouts and 404s, and will move on to some more-entertaining website. Last but not least, prefer to whitelist by cookies, if at all possible, rather than just blanket-block / blanket-slowdown the entire IP. Usually the vandals are sitting at one PC, hopping from page to page, not vandalizing one article while hopping from PC to PC. Note that the age-17 person who gets addicted to editing wikipedia while in high school will soon be the age-18 person doing research for their university essays. The children are our future, as the goofy old saying goes. Don't block schools, that's just shooting ourselves in both feet simultaneously. HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 13:30, 28 September 2013 (UTC)


 * As a former K-12 school teacher, I take a very different attitude. If my students abused the privilege of accessing Wikipedia at school, I would hope that my school's access to Wikipedia would be blocked (at least temporarily). I would turn the experience of having the school's access blocked into a chance to teach my students a valuable life lesson... that one's actions can and do affect others, and that there are negative consequences to negative behavior.  Blueboar (talk) 14:11, 28 September 2013 (UTC)