Saturday, December 1, 2007

Clothes make the man

Considering how often I do this in a robe or something, it feels intensely odd to edit Wikipedia while wearing a suit and tie...

6 comments:

LoveInTheTimeOfMice said...

I noticed that you are the Wikipedia administrator who has blocked editing rights for the IP range for my ISP.

Noticed that this has happened before: http://www.josesandoval.com/blogger/2006_12_01_archive.html

Like Mr Santoval (and thousands of other web visitors, I'm sure), I sometimes pop by Wikipedia to make minor edits when I see them.

You may or may not know this, but your block has been enforced on nearly a million potential Wikipedia visitors in Singapore (there are three or four major ISPs to cater for a country of four million).

I don't think it's your fault that policing Wikipedia is difficult, and I definitely haven't heard your side of things, but like Mr Sandoval has pointed out, it's pretty ridiculous to sacrifice the forest for the trees.

What explains the disparity in treatment between Sympatico and my ISP (a bigger one, I would venture)? If the comparatively brief, Sympatico block was because of " a very persistent and abusive user who was stalking valuable editors and vandalizing a wide number of articles", I can barely imagine what kind of a devil is behind the block on my ISP to merit a block on nearly a million web users for four months.

You explain to Jose Sandoval that you're busy and sometimes make mistakes – but on the scale at which careless decisions affect thousands, would it not be better to defer these things to someone with more time?

Sorry for this long rant. I wish there were other ways to bring this up to you but I'm not even allowed to create a Wikipedia account.

Luna Santin said...

Without knowing the IP address(es) affected, it'll be very hard for me to offer you any decent feedback.

LoveInTheTimeOfMice said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
LoveInTheTimeOfMice said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:218.186.8.12

LoveInTheTimeOfMice said...

Not surprisingly my ISP is one of those single-IP ISPs. Extremely dumb.

Luna Santin said...

Ah. While I appreciate your frustration, it looks like you haven't followed some of the very relevant and helpful directions on Wikipedia's "you've been blocked" page -- if you had, you could see that the block was originally set by Mel Etitis on 3 April 2007; I was simply reconfiguring the block following another user's complaint.

Currently, as is also explained in the block message, you can simply register an account (or log in) and immediately begin editing. Only takes a few seconds.

Soft blocks also help you to avoid frequent problems with autoblocks, which have been a major problem for StarHub users in the past.