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Vandalism exposed
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One of the saddest things about Wikipedia today, besides the color scheme (which totally blows), is the manner in which it is quickly deteriorating. One of the classic pillars of belief in Wikipedism is that Wikipedia gets better over time, but this isn't really true; there are entries that go through high points and low points, often resting at "passable" for long periods of time with a forecast of partly cloudy and a continued chance of crap on through next week.
Besides the suicidal misreadings of the concept of Neutral Point of View, the greatest cause of such deterioration is vandalism, that is, intentional fuckerage with Wikipedia. This situation is where a vast amount of energy is wasted, both in committing and in reverting it.
The real tragedy is that 99% of the vandalism currently occuring is easily preventable. Seriously. Not just preventable in theory, but preventable as in the Wikimedia software which Wikipedia operates on already possesses the technical means to prevent much of it. Jimbo Wales, and the rest of his faithful minions, for reasons beyond our own imagination, refuses to enable them! Can you say heads in the sand, boys and girls? I think you can! Heads in the sand.
[edit] Quickly, the point
Everywhere you go, Wikipedia proclaims itself to be "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." This is not exactly true, as we've established elsewhere, but as long as there is not an administrator wheel war taking place and there are no remote threats of a lawsuit off in the distance, it usually is. There is one exception to this however, and that is vandalism.
Vandalism comes in all shapes and forms on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia were to enforce authentication through email address verification and live captcha confirmation, vandalism would be greatly reduced, in our estimation, to less than 1% of what Wikipedia is experiencing presently. But Jimbo and his fan club says "PSHAW!" to such nonsense!
Other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikibooks, and most other non-English language Wikipedias require a verifiable e-mail address and captcha-styled authentication to complete the user registration process. Captcha support was not added to the English language Wikipedia until February 20, 2007. While there are software programs which can bypass this method of authentication, it does lessen the potential for abuse by wouldbe spammers and vandal bots.
Sound like a system that's open to abuse? Good, you're paying attention.
[edit] Types of vandalism on Wikipedia
So, what types of vandalism does Wikipedia experience, anyhow? A better question is probably "what types of vandalism doesn't Wikipedia experience?" Here's a smattering for your perusal.
[edit] Edit vandalism
By far the most common type of vandalism is the adding of gibberish or cusswords to articles. High-profile articles are often targeted by vandals, often bored high school and college kids, will use the random article feature to find targets. Most of this vandalism is caught and quickly reverted by "RC patrollers": wikinerds who spend their time online as a vandalism vigilante squad. This is fun and provides a low-effort way to contribute to Wikipedia, particularly if you don't have any knowledge worth contributing. Given the number of asinine articles available on Wikipedia, this seems highly unlikely...still, though, there are people who only contribute by reverting others' vandalism. Sound fun? WHERE CAN I SIGN UP?
Sign up right here: WIKIPEDIA's COUNTER VANDALISM UNIT WANTS YOU! Sign up today! See the world! Meet girls! Or, really, have another excuse to sit in your parents' basement, your fingers covered in Cheeto-dust, staring at a CRT — or an LCD if mommy and daddy bought you what you wanted for Christmas — and "helping," knowing that you'll never get laid unless you pay for it — and even that's a long shot.
More subtly, the smarter edit vandal will change figures, dates and facts. These edits can be caught and overturned on the bigger articles, which are watched by several editors, but on smaller pages, the vandal has more chance of getting his or her edit through because the average RC patroller simply will not or cannot check it out. This is especially true when the edit vandal changes an article and then marks the edit as minor. Minor edits are often overlooked by vandal hunters ("Oh, he meant to change '1980' to '1970;' it was just a minor change"). An extension of this tactic would be vandalizing an article, saving the revision, and then correcting something small (such as a spelling error) in a subsequent minor edit. RC patrollers would likely miss the vandalism, as they tend to focus on "big" articles, and users watching that article would only see the minor edit on their watchlists.
Solution: None possible. If the RC patrol misses it, a vandal edit will linger for months waiting for someone to hit on the page and notice it. Errors in fact can remain in perpetuity. Indeed, the longer they remain on the page, the more likely it is that the wikinerds will fight to keep them: although the wiki prides itself on its dynamic nature, many wikinerds want to create a Britannica -- or a Wikipedia 1.0, which means that if they are satisfied with a page, they will fight any momentum for change. Because, as is obvious, if it's been there for a while, it must be true. Even if it's proven not to be.
[edit] Page blanking
Replacing an entire article with a blank page, or a generic statement of some sort. This type of vandalism is easily scripted and used by several "vandal personalities".
Solution: (Work-around) Require captcha confirmation for changes to an article of 2,000 bytes or more. This would not stop all of the page blanking vandalism, but would definitely put a dent into it.
[edit] Edit summary vandalism
A feature of all Wikis is the "edit summary". This is publicly visible in the history log of each page on Wikipedia and cannot be edited. Vandals have been known to take advantage of this by leaving offensive messages within the edit summary of an article. The only way to permanently remove an edit summary is for an official Wikipedia developer to delete it from the database.
Wikipedia has only nine core developers, and they are busy with more pressing things.
Solution: None.
[edit] Image vandalism
Shock-images are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons [1] and then linked to from Wikipedia. Since most Wikipedia administrators do not have sysop permissions on Wikimedia Commons, they are unable to delete the offending image.
Solution: None.
[edit] Username vandalism
Similar to edit summary vandalism, username vandalism is the act of registering a user account name that it highly offensive or inflammatory and then using it to edit Wikipedia.
In response to this problem, one Wikipedia administrator has written a bot which blocks certain accounts which match certain criteria used by vandals or contain certain words. This bot is not officially recognized by Wikipedia and is a matter of contention amongst some of the other Wikipedia God-Kings, but nonetheless, it does a fairly effective job at preventing inflammatory accounts from being able to make a single edit.
Solution: Prevent creation of usernames that match certain keywords at the software level. But where's the fun in that?
[edit] Page move vandalism
Pioneered by a vandal known to Wikipedia as "Willy on Wheels", page move vandalism is moving an article from one place to another. For example, moving the article "George W. Bush" to "George W. Bush on wheels!!!", or something more inflammatory. This would create a redirect page placeholder at the original name, and move all of the history to the new name.
This used to be a major problem for Wikipedia, as an administrator was required in order to move the page back (to this day, normal users cannot reverse this task.) An administrator would have to first delete the placeholder redirect, and then move the page back to its original name.
This type of vandalism began to lay a burden on administrators, so in response, Wikimedia developers put a delay which prevented anonymous users (users who are not logged in) from moving pages, and also placed a delay on newly registered accounts for a period of approximately 4 days from moving pages as well.
The vandal known as Willy on Wheels eventually discovered a loophole and began creating what are now known as "sleeper accounts" en masse. Sleeper accounts are accounts created for the purpose of vandalism which would not be used until the 4 day period had lapsed, and then he would employ them to carry out the page move vandalism.
Solution: Small yet sensible steps have been taken to help regulate this problem to a degree; page moves can now only be performed by user accounts older than 4 days. Additionally, a minimum edit level should be imposed (say 100 edits) increasing the difficulty for vandals to make use of stored sleeper accounts.
[edit] Reverse denial of service
Several internet providers (as well as educational institutions and large corporations) use what are known as transparent webproxies. This means that anywhere from 1 to 100,000 people or more could potentially be sharing the same IP address. America On-line (AOL) and many service providers of small countries are notorious for this.
A vandal who does not actually wish to edit Wikipedia at all can in effect cause a reverse denial of service to everyone else sharing the IP address by purposely vandalizing articles until they are blocked. This can be done as an "anonymous" user who is not logged in, or as a newly registered user, effectively hiding the IP address from everyone except the developers and the 14 people who have Checkuser access.
If this reverse denial of service is done using a registered account, Wikipedia will "autoblock" the underlying IP address for a period of 24 hours. For those 24 hours, no one else is able to edit from that address until another person is able to successfully reach an active administrator who can remove the block.
Solution: Force registration on large webproxies which are known sources of vandalism.
[edit] Disk space vandalism
Some vandals have decided to take advantage of Wikipedia by rapidly consuming the available disk space on their servers. This is done by changing an article from its current contents to 4 megabytes of gibberish text. The change will be quickly undone, but a record of it will be permanently preserved as Wikipedia retains earlier versions and changes of every article.
Solution: Place a reasonable size limitation on articles. There's already a policy that large sections of articles should be broken out into separate articles; this should be forced at the software level.
[edit] Shock-site vandalism
Another way in which people vandalize Wikipedia is by replacing an article's valid external link with a shock-site link. An unsuspecting reader would then click on the external link and find a picture of Tubgirl, HAI2U, the Goatse.cx man, a site which would execute code intended to crash the visitor's web browser, or something along those lines. (Incidentally, Wikipedia's list of shock sites has been nominated for deletion numerous times.[2][3][4][5] Ignore them and they'll go away! Remember what we said about heads in the sand? But that's neither here nor there.)
To counteract the addition of these shocksites, Wikimedia maintains a blacklist of blocked web addresses, which prevents the addition of these and other sites. In order to bypass the blacklist, vandals began utilizing redirect sites, such as TinyURL, which would mask the address. One by one, these services were eventually added to the blacklist as well.
Most recently, resourceful vandals (and spammers) have begun embedding commented text within the URL in order to throw off the blacklist. For example, instead of:
- http://www.tubgirl.com/
one enters this:
- http://www.tub<!-- ABC123XYZ -->girl.com/
which completely bypasses the Wikipedia URL blacklist and reconstructs the URL into a clickable link.
Solution: Disallow the ability to embed commented text within a URL. Wikimedia developers are in the process of patching this problem. [6]
[edit] Template vandalism
By editing a single template, you can affect tens, hundreds, and even thousands of articles with the click of a button.
Solution: Disable editing of templates by non-administrators.
[edit] Vandalism personalities
On the English Wikipedia, some vandals have developed personalities, or characters. The following is an examination of some of them:
[edit] Willy on Wheels
Willy on Wheels (or WoW) was an elaborate page move vandal, and is by far the most infamous of all vandal personalities on Wikipedia with 23,900 mentions throughout the entire English Wikipedia. Willy on Wheels has demonstrated an access to a wide variety of IP addresses and posed a significant threat in terms of disruption when active. The person or people supposedly involved with this vandalism have allegedly quit, [7] but there are a large number of copycats who impersonate this vandal.
[edit] Pisschrist vandal
The Pisschrist vandal is another page blanking vandal who replaces articles with an image of Piss Christ, a controversial photograph of a plastic Jesus Christ attached to a crucifix submerged in urine. Unlike the Wikipedia is Communism vandal, the Pisschrist vandal appears to have a large number of IP addresses at its disposal and poses a grave threat to featured articles displayed on the Main Page of Wikipedia while active, effectively hijacking them from editing by anyone else. This vandal primarily appears to target the featured article, and has been observed to move from one article to the next at precisely 00:00 UTC (when the next featured article is introduced). Most likely an automated script or bot.
[edit] Squidward vandal
The Squidward vandal is the most recent page blanking vandal, and rather than using throwaway accounts relies upon an enormous supply (thousands) of open webproxies from all over the world. Squidward replaces the contents of an article with a cartoon drawing of Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants, all at an unprecedented extremely fast pace. Seriously, it's fast. Thousands of articles get vandalized in the blink of an eye. Articles are targeted at random. If the person or group behind the Squidward vandalism were to randomize their "signature" as well, Wikipedia would be completely helpless against this vandal without imposing some type of mandatory verification, such as captcha, for changes by "anonymous" editors. Even if anonymous editors were somehow thwarted, sleeper accounts (as described previously) could be used to continue the Squidward vandalism.
[edit] Wikipedia is Communism
Wikipedia is Communism is effectively a page blanking vandal who most likely uses tabbed browsing to carry out the dirty work. Although the threat from this particular vandal is relatively low, it has gained a degree of notoriety for replacing articles with a hammer and cicle, dressed with text proclaiming boldly that "WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNISM". If this vandal were to employ the methods of other vandals (e.g. the Squidward vandal or the Pisschrist vandal), the damage could be far greater.
[edit] External links
- Wikibugs - Bugzilla report 997: Allow permanent deletion of revisions filed by mijobe on December 4, 2004 [8]
- Wikibugs - Bugzilla report 5149: Retroactive autoblocking needed filed by Raul654 on March 3, 2006
- Wikipedia:Deny recognition a Wikipedia proposal to deny recognition to repeat vandals
