<CPOV> Kafka and Orwell join forces on Wikipedia

[Felipe Ortega]

2011/5/18 nathaniel tkacz <nathanieltkacz at gmail.com>

> very interesting indeed dror - i wonder if anyone who follows the wp tech
> lists knows anything of it. is this new? was it discussed?
>
>
If you follow the link to the parent page, you can learn some details about
the Edit filter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter

Apparently, it's working since March 2009. Interestingly, it is the first
time I've heard of anyone affected by this bot. I'm curious about the type
of comment that was being filtered. I mean, perhaps not the answer from
friend's friend of Dror, but the original comment from other user this
person was trying to reply to.

>From the page of false positives, I read several cases in which you are
filtered because you reproduce in you answer inappropriate words from a
prior edit, or you are deleting vandalism.

Thanks for the heads up.

Felipe.


> perhaps our resident botologist, stuart geiger, knows something of these
> developments?
>
> Nate Tkacz
>
> School of Culture and Communication
> University of Melbourne
>
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/__nate__
>
> Research Page: http://nathanieltkacz.net
>
> Current project: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/about-2/
>
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:18 PM, Dror Kamir <dqamir at bezeqint.net> wrote:
>
>>  Hello,
>>
>> An interesting anecdote that has been brought to my attention -
>>
>> A friend's friend of mine tried to write a comment on the Talk Page of the
>> English WP's article about the Golan Heights. The comment was detailed and
>> referred to fallacies in comments of another user. The discussion is
>> interesting for itself, but a technical issue that happened when he tried to
>> post the comment was much more interesting.
>>
>> He is not someone who regularly writes on WP, and registering for one
>> comment seemed to him inappropriate (his intuition worked well, he could
>> have been accused of being a "sock puppet" for such registration). So he
>> wrote whatever he wrote, pressed "save page", and received the following
>> error message: "*An automated filter has identified this edit as
>> potentially unconstructive, and it has been disallowed. If this edit is
>> constructive, please report this error<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives>
>> *". He thought something was wrong with his Internet connection, so he
>> reconnected. The error message was still there. He then clicked the "report
>> this error" link. This link led him to a page, in which he had to search for
>> another link (I think this is the page:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives).
>> Luckily, the link was on the top of that page, so he found it quickly and
>> clicked it. An edit box with all kinds of strange markings and explanations
>> appeared. He eventually found where to write the name of the page on which
>> he tried to post his comment. Below it he pasted the comment that triggered
>> the error message. When pressing "save page" he received an error message: "
>> *An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially
>> unconstructive, and it has been disallowed. If this edit is constructive,
>> please report this error<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_filter/False_positives>
>> *".
>>
>> Had I been cruel, I'd say it is a combination of Kafka and Orwell - the
>> encyclopedia that anyone can edit gets you in an indefinite loop in order to
>> prevent you from editing. I'm not that cruel, so instead I had a good laugh
>> and decided to share it with you.
>>
>> Dror K
>>
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>>
>
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