User:Equazcion/sandbox2/Archive 110

Bright line rule
As a result of the current PR-sockpuppet scandal and related discussions I have proposed that Jimbo Wale's "Bright line rule" be officially made part of Wikipedia policy at WP:NOT Please see Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not for my discussion of the change I made at WP:NOT. (My proposed change was reverted twice within two minutes, so I'm not sure the change will still be there). Smallbones( smalltalk ) 00:10, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * The only way your proposed change could have been reverted twice in two minutes is if you edit-warred to reinstate it after it was reverted the first time. Please don't do that. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:22, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Softblock school IPs on sight as is done with open proxies
Okay, this is something that is already commonly done, as can be seen here, here, and here (note how these three IPs were blocked before being issued the standard four warnings, not counting warnings from prior months, and how 64.56.87.247 was profiled as being "probably" a high school IP address). I'm actually playing devil's advocate here, because I don't really support this proposal, but I would rather see this be made official rather than a few sysops doing it because they can. I would argue that not every edit that comes from a school is malicious in nature, take for example 208.66.198.214 belonging to Gulf Coast High School. Of the seven edits that IP has made since coming off of an extended block from 2011, four have been good faith edits and three have been blatant vandalism (a majority of good faith edits). Realistically, who is more likely to go to the bother of creating an account at home, a person wanting to fix an article/update an article, or someone who is hell bent on defacing an article? Furthermore, many school IPs don't spew out vandalism at an intolerable rate (five malicious edits in one week, spread out over multiple days, coming from an IP representing upwards of 15,000 students + faculty, isn't an intolerable about IMHO, considering many residential IP ranges spew out more vandalism (as well as good faith edits) and don't get softblocked). As for creating work, people in non-English speaking countries often create and edit articles with poor spelling and grammar, hence creating more work for us, but I highly doubt we'd ever soft range-block these regions based on that, because that would be extremely racist. School IPs don't just represent students either; they also represent faculty, most of whom (save for support staff) have college educations, and I know we have at least a few registered contributors and sysops whom are school teachers. On the other hand, as a RC patrol and vandal fighter here at Wikipedia, and sysop-lite on Conservapedia, I can appreciate a no-nonsense position when it comes to dealing with vandalism. In any case, I don't see anything changing as to how things are done, kids are always going to be kids (on Wikipedia or otherwise), and in my opinion, it would be better to have an official policy for soft-blocking school IPs on sight, as is currently done with open proxies, than to have some sysops blocking school IPs in a heavy-handed manner because their opinion is that school IPs do nothing but cause trouble. There are, in fact, some school IPs that almost exclusively vandalize, though not all are like this. I doubt that it helps that kids are often told not to use Wikipedia because it can be edited. Abuse response is moribund, so that alternative to blocking is gone. We hardblock open proxies because of the problems they create. The general consensus, in my understanding, is that registration should not be required, but perhaps schools (or perhaps even shared IPs in general) should be the exception. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 20:23, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If you are trying to write a policy on this, you might find some inspiration from da:Wikipedia:Blokering af uregistrerede brugere fra danske grundskoler about the same issue on Danish Wikipedia. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:05, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, firstly my intent is to develop consensus one way or the other, and exactly how to implement in a way that would work for the English Wikipedia. If consensus is to support such policy, then we decide how we're going to implement such policy. Do we apply this policy just to K-12s, or to community colleges and universities as well? Do we allow account creation or disable it? If consensus is to reject such policy on the English Wikipedia, then we address how we should go forward in regards to the current system of escalating blocks every time such IPs are blocked (and sometimes skipping the shorter blocks and jumping straight to year-long blocks based on a sysop's opinion as to what kind of institution an IP belongs to). Personally, I would like to see change one way or the other. But indeed, that Danish Wikipedia page was interesting to read, and could be helpful in drafting a similar policy here on the English Wikipedia. PCHS-NJROTC  (Messages) 21:31, 5 September 2013 (UTC)


 * My comments as one of the admins involved in these blocks:
 * PCHS-NJROTC and I have already engaged in a very detailed analysis and discussion of school blocks on this school system on my talk page at:
 * User talk:A. B.
 * See my comments there.


 * For additional viewpoints pro and con on this topic, see this 2012 community discussion PCHS-NJROTC initiated:
 * Administrators' noticeboard/Archive231


 * I never just block a school IP on sight -- I have to see a history of ignored warnings and mostly vandalistic edits.


 * I normally leave some explanatory comments for my reasoning when blocking an IP; see my blocking log for what I'm talking about. In making this assessment I look at:
 * Previous warnings including those blanked but still in the talk page history
 * Edit filter (a.k.a. abuse filter) record
 * Previous blocks
 * Warnings and blocks on other Wikimedia projects (Wiktionary, other language versions of Wikipedia, etc.)
 * Diffs for the IP's edits -- back to at least the last block.
 * If there's been recent substantive, useful content coming from an IP, I'm wary of blocking it. On the other hand, if I see mostly abuse + an occasional minor edit, the small useful edits just aren't worth the disruption.
 * I think I'm pretty thorough and careful. I've made several thousand blocks, almost all of them to vandalism-only anonymous IPs. To my knowledge only a handful have been reversed or even questioned. As I said above, take a look at my blocking history and judge for yourself.


 * If I note a school as "probably" a school IP, I will have looked at the dates and times of the edits (including the abuse filter) as well as trace routes, geolocations and whois reports. I also look at the edits; if 25% are to the article for a specific school with comments like "Ms. Smith's algebra class sucks", it's probably, but not certainly, that school. If the IP is making edits in the middle of the night (in their time zone) or over school holidays, it's probably not a school. On the other hand, if the vandalism is childish in nature and only occurs during school hours -- well, it's probably a school. And if I'm wrong -- it's a non-school vandalism-only account that edits just like a school, it still needs to be blocked to prevent further disruption.


 * I'm slower than most admins to block regular editors viewed as problematic by others, preferring to exhaust other possibilities. I worry about BITE-yness around here. When it comes to chronic sources of schoolkid vandalism (Joey wears poopy-pants, etc.), however, I just see it as plugging leaks (garbage leaks in, content leaks out). It's a waste to have an IP that's a source of recurring vandalism over many years. You can just see that very little good is going to come out of these.


 * It's also demoralizing for our contributors to see their work deleted or defaced.


 * We have many useful younger contributors, even admins, that attend primary and secondary schools, probably some using IPs that I've blocked. They have registered accounts. Our block notices specifically invite serious contributors to register.
 * -- A. B. (talk • contribs • global count) 23:25, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the input, A. B., I'm glad you were able to input your opinion into the discussion. All considered, since most schools (in my opinion) likely have a history of vandalism, would you support or oppose across the board softblocks on NAT devices belonging to K-12 schools, as is done (as a hardblock) with open proxies? PCHS-NJROTC  (Messages) 13:58, 8 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry to be slow in responding.


 * 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 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)


 * 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)


 * @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)


 * 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)