The Wikipedia Filters Thread

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Mutineer
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The Wikipedia Filters Thread

Post by Mutineer » Sat Mar 25, 2017 5:35 pm

There's all manner of psychiatric-help-needed activity going on amongst those Wikipedia administrators doing filters. The filters at Wikipedia are basically unregulated and out of control and there are some real [strange and obsessive] doing them, such as Kww (Kevin Williams) before he was desysopped.

I noticed a few days back a new wrinkle. A filter reverted and blocked the IP of a block-evader editing via IP within a few seconds. It was based on a key word. (That's basically how the filters work I think, the administrative chump in question puts keywords in to stop the edits of an hated one.) But the new wrinkle is, I think, the blocking of the IP. The filter appeared to steer the edit to the account of a particular, presumed human, administrator that then by the log blocked the IP. But this happened in seconds. The administrator could not have reacted so quickly.

It seemed to me to indicate that administrators are doing some stuff that allows filters to trigger IP blocks under their accounts. I guess it'd be some sort of adlibbed thing because the filter can't block an IP on its own. So the administrator connects it "here, use my account" somehow.

The implications of this, even if it's rare right now, is that administrators are doing IP blocks without actually considering them, like as a human being ought to. It was just kind of weird, really, so I thought I'd discuss it here.

Sorry, I'm not going to link you to the diffs and log and so forth.

EDIT: Rephrased wording minorly.
Last edited by Mutineer on Mon Mar 27, 2017 10:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Wikipedia Filters Thread

Post by badmachine » Sat Mar 25, 2017 11:28 pm

It's possible the admin saw it on one of the IRC recent changes feeds and has a quick mouse finger.

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Re: The Wikipedia Filters Thread

Post by Mutineer » Sun Mar 26, 2017 10:10 am

badmachine wrote:It's possible the admin saw it on one of the IRC recent changes feeds and has a quick mouse finger.


You are probably right. It happened so remarkably fast that I thought "filter." But a filter by definition stops edits before they are made, it doesn't retroactively go back and wipe them out.
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Re: The Wikipedia Filters Thread

Post by HRA1924 » Sun Mar 26, 2017 9:01 pm

Mutineer wrote:
badmachine wrote:It's possible the admin saw it on one of the IRC recent changes feeds and has a quick mouse finger.


You are probably right. It happened so remarkably fast that I thought "filter." But a filter by definition stops edits before they are made, it doesn't retroactively go back and wipe them out.
Vandalpatrol (or whatever they call it these days) is so competitive among teens (wanting to become admins) that they write bots to revert straight off the feeds. They take in things like age of account, number of edits etc., so new SOCK accounts are likely to be reverted faster and more often. Some of the better (ilegal/undeclared) bots connected to user accountd to boost edit counts respond in under 2 minutes.

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