[Wikipedia-l] Re: The dangers of bots, and robustness of the system

Wed Mar 19 11:53:57 UTC 2003

On Tuesday 18 March 2003 11:55 pm, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> Yet another reason why bots should always be cleared: the bot
> from 12.246.100.201 that stomped on about 30 pages just now was me.
> Even well-intentioned bots can cause significant damage if not
> treated with care. This one was my Wiki software test suite, which
> was supposed to be testing a new installation of the software on a
> machine on my local LAN, not the live Wiki.

Hi Lee! So that was you eh? 

> Anyway, another observation: after stopping it, I came to fix
> the damage, and _I couldn't edit fast enough to catch up to the
> other Wikipedians who had already reverted all my damage_.
> It's nice to know the system is robust enough to recover from
> damage done even by its own developers. :-)

Yeah, I had the same "problem" after the first hour of the MIT vandal attack: 
In order to preserve my sanity I was trying to edit articles for a few 
minutes between rolling back the vandal's edits en masse. But by the time I 
got to the rolling back part I found that much of the vandal's damage had 
already been fixed by regular users. 

I also found that the rollback feature can cause trouble in these situations 
since it blindly reverts the top edit and doesn't track /who/ made the top 
edit. So on a couple dozen occasions that night I accidently resurrected the 
vandal's edits because because somebody else had reverted the article a 
second before I hit "rollback."

So after a while I felt like I was starting to get in the way especially after 
about an hour into the attack when the "immune system" of Wikipedia was fully 
primed and my Admin powers became largely irrelevant (and in fact a bit 
counterproductive). 

Wikimmunity at its best I say (a smarter rollback and the ability to block 
logged-in vandals via IP address would be still be nice though...). 

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 13]]