The MIT vandal might be discouraged from repeating his
antics if someone
complains to MIT about him. While we don't explicitly know who it was, it
seems from what I've read that we know what IP addresses he was using at
specific times so if MIT keep track of this then they will know who he is.
Pointing out to them that if actions like these are repeated then wikipedia
may be forced to block ranges of MITs IP addresses which would adversely
affect their students as this is a useful educational resource etc might
spur them into action.
While I wouldn't like to see anything serious happen to him a warning about
his future conduct regarding university network facilities (which
universities seem quite keen to give) might encourage him not to repeat his
actions.
Just an idea..
Andrew
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com>
To: <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: SERIOUS HELP NEEDED NOW!
Erik Moeller wrote:
Any solution that depends on Jimbo being present
is IMHO
flawed. Jimbo is usually logged off on the weekends, for example.
I agree with this.
At this point, we're not talking about *policy* per se. Policy on
simple vandals very much empowered the sysops to ban the MIT vandal,
it's just that a technical limitation made it impossible. The wiki
model of trust means that sysops can ban simple vandals without even
talking to me about it -- this happens all the time -- but that bans
of people who are not *just* simple vandals requires a discussion
point.
This is a check on our power (all of us, even me), to prevent the
temptation to ban people for political disagreements.
We already have that - IP blocking. We never had
a vandal that could
switch IPs faster than we could block them. What would be nice is
wildcard support at least for the fourth octet.
This would have been helpful this weekend. Obviously, wildcard
blocked ips should be restored to use more rapidly than single ips,
because they are much more likely to negatively impact legitimate
users.
We should also have account
creation per IP throttling.
That's a good idea, too, but in this *particular* case it would not
have helped. The MIT vandal was hopping ips fairly quickly.
But a fourth octet wildcard would generally knock out an entire
computer lab or coffee shop no problem.
--Jimbo
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