Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Long-term abuse




 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was Keep. The question of whether or not to depricate/mark as historical is beyond the scope of this discussion. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:51, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Long-term abuse
Previous debate at Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Long_term_abuse

Over the 18 months since the need for this page was previously discussed, the approach to vandalism on Wikipedia has matured, and there is greater confidence in the tools and methods first introduced 2-3 years ago, to wit:
 * The automated tools to follow recent changes have grown in sophistication, quantity, and number of users
 * The use of pattern matching to detect vandalism, pioneered in the aforementioned tools, is now common in fully automated bots and the abuse filter.
 * The de facto policy on checkuser and blocking has become less burdensome on those Wikipedians who are dealing with vandalism
 * There are more effective means of dealing with open proxies, including automated detection
 * Anti-vandalism features have been added to MediaWiki itself, such as expanding use of captchas, non-admin rollback, the project-specific spam blacklist, edit throttling, and finer control of range blocks

Nearly any editor who has been around long enough would acknowledge that the threat of vandalism, though still present, has continuously declined over the last five years. The monitoring at the counter-vandalism page confirms this.

The importance of denying recognition to vandals has, in my opinion, become more important than the retention of often inaccurate and increasingly dated documentation of vandalism patterns. In today's Wikipedia, it is not necessary to understand who engages in what patterns of vandalism to deal with it.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 17:13, 28 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Comment I have been wondering if this LTA page even works. I have serious concerns over denial of recongnition and this page Ive been doing some checking of some people listed here and ive seen a few circumstances of those on this list bragging about being on LTA (Ive found some threads of users on this page gloating on blogs etc for being listed here). Which would be going against wp:deny? The process we have is only seems to appear to feed them further. I agree with many of the issues stated above. I think adding the information here to the SPI investigations is a more beneficail practice as record keeping of serious offenders can be made there. It is very difficult in the LTA pages current state to get information off this and to interpret it correctly (seems to be vague collections of partial SPIs). Essentially if someone on the list comes back and someone can identify its prudent to build a SPI about them to keep track of the new socks and Ips anyway. But thats just the point, why not merge the information here to the releveant SPIs? I dont think what we have here is working entirely. Im willing to explore options for improving it though if people are interested (but this doesnt seem to be the case, am I wrong?). Re-defining the process would be preferable to me. Or a historical tag added with entries removed/archived. At any rate a discussion regarding the necessity of this page is entirely warrented I beleive Ottawa4ever (talk) 17:34, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete including any and all subpages. Personally, I don't believe in WP:DENY all that much, but I agree that this is still a sloppy and inefficient way to handle the whole deal. These are basically incoherent, incomplete SPIs and almost all of the users in question have long since stopped vandalizing (even ones as long-term as StealBoy haven't hit in ages). Even in cases where the users are still out there targeting us, there are already more comprehensive SPI cases which do pretty much the same thing in a much more organized fashion. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Many otters • One bat • One hammer) 20:06, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. I'm not much of a fan of WP:DENY, which is, after all, only an essay &mdash; there was never a consensus to elevate it to guideline or policy status. I think the LTA page and subpages are an important part of Wikipedia's history and heritage. I would, however, have no problem with marking these pages historical if the community thinks they are not likely to be of continued use going forward. *** Crotalus *** 20:20, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * You want to delete WP:TREASON? :-( --MZMcBride (talk) 21:59, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep still useful resource. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:50, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
 * delete but not because there isn't a need for the service but because I don't think that it fulfils the need. My understanding is that the purpose of LTA is to inform editors of patterns of behaviour that indicate that they might be dealing with a banned or blocked user so that they don't have to go through the whole DR process to re-establish the block or ban. This can be hard work and in some cases they risk being harassed, badmouthed and intimidated both on and off wiki, as is the case if anyone is unfortunate enough to appear in the cross-hairs of the banned user I have experience of. I understand there are a few others like that. The place an editor is likely to encounter this is if they edit a subject that the banned user is associated with. Most of the reports list associated articles or areas of interest. It is on the talk pages of these articles where there needs to be a warning to the effect that if you encounter this sort of behaviour then file an SPI or contact this editor/admin who is familiar with the case. Otherwise how would an editor find out? At what point would they think to visit this current LTA page if they even knew it existed? So my suggestion is to replace this page with a talk page banner that links to a modus operandi report and an SPI log. If we are protecting editors from griefing then whether or not the banned/blocked user gloats about the attention is secondary. I think it is a case-by-case thing in that some just want attention and some are a real-life hazzard. Whatever system we end up with, I think we need some relief from long lists of IP addresses. That's a complete mess. There are suspected/confirmed sock pages for that purpose. Bksimonb (talk) 06:07, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Mark historical no need to delete history, but should be marked historical and archived. We have refined processes that completely overlap with what LTA used to do. Gigs (talk) 18:30, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep for historical purposes. -- SPhilbrick  T  01:14, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep and make historical For archive purposes, some of the cases there may be useful, but the page has outgrown its usefulness. No prejudice to restarting the project, or starting a new one with the same purpose, once a better method of working it comes about, but its clear the page has become moribund.  -- Jayron  32  05:03, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep for current purposes. I would define "long term" as persistent ill-behaviour generally occurring over more than one year. These edit patterns should be flagged somewhere to stop other editors from re-inventing the wheel, as in the classic "what-if-I-get-hit-by-a-bus-tomorrow?" scenario. UC advances good arguments for what need not be included here, but the page still has utility. Even abuse filters could benefit from an included private comment pointing to the LTA entry. Franamax (talk) 05:17, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep How else could I possibly teach others how to recognize various serial vandals? For that matter, how would I learn about them myself?  I was coming here right now to get more information.  If this gets deleted I'm going to save it to my hard drive because I need it.   —  Soap  —  21:06, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. Going through the SPI archives is extremely inefficient for some purposes. Many SPI cases on serial vandals have "evidence" sections that read "The usual" or something similar. While that is sufficient for people dealing with these vandals all the time, it's almost impossible to discern the MO without going over the contribs of numerous socks if you don't know it already, something the LTA pages help to alleviate. Tim Song (talk) 03:32, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Deprecate and mark as historical - no need to keep it active, for all the reasons discussed above, but neither is there a need to delete it outright (history may be useful and/or interesting). Improved technology has significantly cut the levels of 'organized' vandalism to the point where LTA is superfluous. - Mobius Clock  08:50, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep I've only just heard of this and have now bookmarked it because it looks valuable. Peridon (talk) 16:38, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep, useful. Every now and then one runs into yet another vandal of whom you know that they have been around, but you can't find out where.  Some of those are just here, and when the M.O. is documented, one can find them back.  Also note, WP:DENY can be met by making sure it is noindexed, and that it is not updated for every new edit the serial-vandal does, and that the page, in fact, is still updated (a good handful of edits a month) and new cases are added (so 'historical' is certainly not the case).  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 12:14, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I think this is a good start with thinking of how to improve the page, but some of this i dont think will work. Some users who fight vandalism, seem not to even know this page exists as mentioned above, non indexing would inhibit that further would it not?, and make it harder to search out simmialr edits using a search engine on the web? I think also that the people on this list have a grasp of wether they are on here or not (some seem to rebuttle their own entries at times) and others seem to post links back to this page advertising their entries. Non indexing i think wont prevent this. Some of this is a start though for improvement on the page though, I like imposing a limit and making the entry expansions more concise if i interpreted correctly, But it doesnt solve all of the key issues i think. Any other thoughts on this? Ottawa4ever (talk) 14:06, 4 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep Very useful resource, and per above. Aditya Ex Machina  17:04, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.