Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:08 UTC
People often make an anonymous change to a Wikipedia page, and later want to claim it as their own. The current method of fulfilling such requests is so highly manual, and the demand for this service so great, that the page on which users are supposed to make such requests has been changed to include a big red box saying "Service suspended - Edits have not been reattributed for some months. There are no indications when requests made here will be executed, if ever." I don't see why this is not simply an automatic service. There's a great demand for it, and, although I am not familiar with the wiki code, it seems that it should be almost trivial to implement. Specifically, something along these lines: Just put a "Claim attribution" link in each page's "Toolbox" . If you click it, and if your IP address matches any of the IP addresses of anonymous comments on the page, then they're instantly and automatically assigned to your username.
Many (most?) IP addresses are dynamically assigned from a pool or represent a proxy which may serve several, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. Claiming all edits by an arbitrary IP without a human review can't be done.
Why not? Exactly what "review" can be done that allows a person to determine that Username X, currently at IP address a.b.c.d, currently claiming that he or she wrote something that was written by someone at IP address a.b.c.d, is or is not lying?
And that's why.
Assuming that "And that's why" is referring to what I wrote and by implication saying that no such review can be done, rather than referring to the fact that you just set it to "wontfix" and wanted to tersely imply that this conversation is beneath you, then: My point is that what I described is, as far as I can tell, the way that it always has been done - a human checks that the IP address matches, and that's the extent of the "review". That is something that can easily be done by a computer. So if the reason for the disabling of the manual version of this feature was that it was too highly manual for the sheer volume of requests, then the fact that there is no good "review" that can be done automatically is not relevant - there's no good "review" that can be, or in fact was, done manually anyway. Now if the reason for the disabling of the manual version was that there's no good review that can be done, that's (potentially) another story. But just read the "discussion" page for the "Changing attribution" page - maybe I missed something, but there seems to be NO indication that this was disabled due to the theoretical possibility of abuse. NONE. On the other hand, there is a WHOLE LOT of discussion about how tedious this is, how long it takes, that developers have (what they perceive as) better things to do than manually fix attributions, and so forth. And, once again, there is a great demand for this feature. Lots of people accidentally post something only to realize that they're not logged in, or want to take attribution for things that they wrote before they made an account. Frankly, the lack of the ability to do this just plain sucks, and theoretical concerns about the possibility of abuse seem to be almost irrelevant in comparison. But if you're REALLY concerned about abuse, just add a flag indicating whether or not a change was previously anonymous, but claimed by its current author. People can take the attribution with a grain of salt, if they perceive any need (which, frankly, seems unlikely at best).
I don't know what you're talking about. What's "the disabling of the manual version of this feature" refer to?
It was a longstanding policy that, when a person wanted to claim attribution for an anonymous comment, they post a request on the page "Wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Changing_attribution_for_an_edit). They would, while logged in, say what page/revision they were claiming, then log out, and, using only their IP address, would say something like "Yeah, this is really me". Theoretically, someone with appropriate permissions would then update the database. I say "theoretically" because this would often take a LONG time - weeks, even months. Because nobody really wanted to spend their time doing this. But at the same time, there was a HUGE demand for it. So the backlog got greater and greater and greater. And the exact way in which requests were made was constantly morphing in an attempt to make the process more efficient - for example, "Type your request into a table, laid out like such-and-such". But it never helped - demand always outstripped supply, by a huge margin. Every so often, some kind soul with appropriate permission would take it upon themselves to try to make a dent. But that was rare, and the demands always reflooded soon after anyway. Eventually, the service was "suspended", as noted in a big red box at the top of the page: "Service suspended Edits have not been reattributed for some months. There are no indications when requests made here will be executed, if ever." It is, frankly, almost unbelievable that the reason for this was theoretical concerns of abuse, given that: (1) Such abuse always could have been done; (2) It was always obvious that such abuse could have been done; (3) There was no (or virtually no) discussion on the importance of such theoretical abuse; (4) There was LOTS of discussion about how tedious it was, and how demand was too great for the people with appropriate permissions to keep up with.
I don't know where you got this idea of the "reason"; the reason that manual reattribution was suspended was that it required direct database manipulation available only to a small number of cluster administrators. That's why we now have Special:Renameuser, allowing relatively quick reattributions to be run by existing trusted users on the wikis.
(In reply to comment #7) > That's why we now have Special:Renameuser, allowing relatively quick reattributions to > be run by existing trusted users on the wikis. Special:Renameuser doesn't do attributions, only existing user => nonexisting user
"I don't know where you got this idea of the "reason"; the reason that manual reattribution was suspended was that it required direct database manipulation available only to a small number of cluster administrators." Which is not necessary. Unless you can explain to me what relevant task a cluster administrator could do that a "Claim attribution" link on each page cannot do, this is simply not germane. I'm not claiming that there is no such task, but you haven't pointed one out yet, and earlier posts of yours seemed to imply that there is none.
Because Special:Renameuser hadn't been written yet.
"Because Special:Renameuser hadn't been written yet." Could you please explain how that is relevant? First, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason just indicated that Special:Renameuser is not applicable to this discussion. Second, even if it is applicable, then if it was written to allow "relatively quick reattributions" (as you said), then why are reattributions not being done? Or if they are being done, why does the page where users request reattributions indicate that, hey, sorry guys, you're out of luck? Either it is (A) Not applicable; (B) A poor solution to a problem with an easy solution; or (C) Not being used. Or else the page where people request reattributions should be changed to tell people how to submit reattributions to this wonderful new thing, instead of telling people in a big red box that it's just not gonna happen.
Special:Renameuser doesn't do everything yet; currently it hits the primary easy case of changing existing user accounts to non-overlapping new names.
Resolving as WONTFIX again as we will under no circumstances add the requested feature (allowing anyone editing from a certain IP to claim all edits from that IP to their account without review). If you want to request further improvements to Special:Renameuser to handle the other use cases, file a bug for that.
"Resolving as WONTFIX again as we will under no circumstances add the requested feature" Fine, but: "(allowing anyone editing from a certain IP to claim all edits from that IP to their account without review)" You said this was the problem before, and I asked you a question in response. Twice, in fact. You did not answer it, but here you are claiming the problem again. So, I will ask you again: What relevant review can a human do that a computer cannot?
A human can read the edits and make an educated guess about whether it looks like they are likely from multiple different people, and can refuse to make the change if it seems to be an illegitimate request.
Okay, it's now Bug 3539, framed in terms of Special:Renameuser.
"A human can read the edits and make an educated guess about whether it looks like they are likely from multiple different people, and can refuse to make the change if it seems to be an illegitimate request." I would enjoy seeing an example, in any of the many, many reattributions that were done in the past, of this being anything but theoretical.
