User:Snoyes

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Vespula 0078.JPG

Watch out, vandals!

Hi, my name is Sascha Noyes.

My homepage: http://www.pantropy.net

I'm a wikiholic with the following declared biases:

  • Freedom
    • free software
    • anti: copyrights, patents, censorship
  • Materialism
    • Science
    • anti: religion/supertition
  • Environment
    • Biodiversity
    • anti: destruction of the environment

Amusements

  • "... the dangers of free inquiry should be taken seriously" - Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt.
Appeared on Anti-Defamation League, before being removed by a certain person saying it was "taken out of context". (can still be seen at Noam Chomsky --Martin)
Appeared on wikipedia-l mailing list in reference to dealing with vandals.
  • "Dumping my life's accumulated factoids into Wikipedia seems like a fun thing to do, we'll see how it goes. Two weeks later, it seems more like being an ADD-afflicted magpie in a bottle cap factory!" User:Stan Shebs on his user page

Quotes

  • "Before man understood the causal connection of physical phenomena, nothing was so natural as to suppose they were produced by intelligent beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else would they have resembled? When philosophers recognised the absurdity of the fables about the gods, but had not yet gained an insight into natural history, they thought to explain the causes of phenomena by abstract expressions such as essences and faculties. It was only at a later period, that by observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies hypotheses were formed which could be developed by mathematics and verified by experience." - Turgot, quoted by J. B. Bury in The idea of progress. gutenberg text.

Stats on anon editors

I embarked on a bit of a project to gather some numbers on the edits that anonymous users make on wikipedia. This was interresting to me as I wanted some hard facts to shed light on the two contrary theories on allowing anonymous editing. Those that support anonymous editing say that they don't want any barrier to entry, in order to gain the largest amount of contributers possible, even if it means constantly dealing with vandalism. Those against anonymous editing state that most of the users who will be deterred from contributing because of some registration requirements will not really be missed, as those are also the ones likely to be vandals. Furthermore, by requiring registration one would substantially cut back the amount of vandalism, thereby freeing up a lot of time others spend policing on Recent Changes for contributions.

I looked at every anonon edit between 01:30 and 15:00 on 31/10 (13.5 hours). Determining whether an edit was vandalism or contribution. The definition of vandalism was: any edit that would have to be reverted/removed by someone else. This included: simple vandalism, obvious POV insertion, posting of text on a talk page that was not related to improving the article. Everything else was counted as a contribution (except insertion of interlanguage links which were ignored). Articles that were vandalised were checked whether they still contained the vandalism at 17:00. (Giving a timeframe of 2 to 15.5 hours to correct the vandalism)

  • There were a total of 408 edits. 97 of those were vandalism, and 311 contributions.

Vandalisms were subdivided into those that were removed by 03:45 (01/11), and those that weren't:

  • 81 removed/reverted
  • 16 missed

This means that these 16 edits were not found by monitoring of Recent Changes. Therefore, the only way that these will be corrected is by someone stumbling upon them. This is easy in some cases (because of obvious profanity), but others (such as deletions of sections of text) will be hard for the casual reader to spot.

A quarter of anonymous edits are counterproductive, wasting others time on reverting edits and keeping a constant eye on Recent Changes. What do you think? (post on my talk page)

Vanity dictates: My Wikipedia contributions

To do:

Outside Resources

News

Software

Other

lists

stuff

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