User talk:Dmuth/PeopleWhoDon'tWantToBeOnAWiki

I think the most legitimate concern for some people (some of whom have already expressed this concern to me on the side) isn't being listed on the wiki with publicly available information. More, it's just an issue of libel/vandalism/wiki-as-tool-for-net.stalkers. I.e. In short, they fear the wiki being used as an UrbanDictionary, which is full of personal attacks and bizarre, fictionalized information intended to mock or defame specific individuals. The exclusion template is probably about the best solution if such a commited vandalism attack follows a particular person to the wiki.

Though I do wonder - not knowing much yet about the underlying structure and limitations of the wiki - about the possibility of giving individual registered users the ability to apply a protected status to pages linked to their account to temporarily halt a vandalism spree without being forced to blank themselves right off the wiki.

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 * Plenty of us check the Special:Recentchanges page quite frequently, and we revert vandalism as it happens. If it's anything more than a single page being vandalized, then the IP is blocked for several days as well.  In MediaWiki, it's quite easy to compare changes made in pages with the "history" function, and and it's also fairly easy to revert a page to its previous state.  If you check the histories of some of the pages that have been vandalized, you'll see that they get reverted rather quickly.


 * Those of us who are Administrators are the only ones who can "protect" pages from future modifications. We only protect pages if there is repeated vandalism, an "editing war" between two opposing viewpoints, or the user requests us to do it. (which has happened on a few occasions)


 * I don't know if you've been to Wikipedia, but that's pretty much a larger scale version of what we're trying to do here. It has well over a million pages, and only a few hundred administrators.  Vandalism there is typically reverted within minutes, and the content is policed pretty well.  --Dmuth 15:30, 24 Aug 2005 (UTC)