| abian added a comment. |
Not necessarily contentious topics showing up in the news. These days we're experiencing an unstoppable wave of vandalism over common entities with the aim of playing, not only with Wikipedia, but with all kinds of tools and services based on Wikidata. Vandalizing Wikidata has become a popular game, even a meme, with many cases grown from social media, especially having Google and Siri as targets. Today the former chair of Wikimedia Chile and former Executive Director of Wikimedia Argentina suggests blocking all unregistered Wikidata users in Chile as the best solution to stop vandalism in his country and the resulting bad press. Last week I semiprotected all the current sovereign states after Iraq's label was changed to "Iran". Some complaints were also raised because of this apparently trivial change, which was soon propagated to the Wikipedias, but its reversion was not, leaving lots of biographies with a nonsensical cause of death.
I don't think this is just a trend, there's no reason to think vandalism will stop at some point unless Wikidata stops being used in the Wikipedias, in Google, in Siri and in other tools, something that we obviously don't wish.
This isn't a small feat nor a pleasant measure, but maybe the best solution is to force users to register and complete a brief tutorial (for example, some instructions and a couple of test edits on certain items with low impact) before editing. This tutorial would make some vandals abandon their now-less-funny aims while it would help good-faith users. At this point I don't think the community can deal with anonymous edits on highly interlinked entities any longer. @Lydia_Pintscher, I'd love to read your thoughts on this and know if you see this as a solution or would like different measures to be applied. We might also want to expose the problem on the project chat and/or via RfC soon.
Cc: abian, Krenair, Aklapper, Lydia_Pintscher, Nandana, Lahi, Gq86, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, LawExplorer, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Mbch331
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