On Fri, 08 Jun 2012 03:49:01 -0700, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 8 June 2012 04:08, Strainu <strain...@gmail.com> wrote:
2012/6/7 Risker <risker...@gmail.com>:
> The first IPv6 edit to English Wikipedia required suppression, I have
been
> advised, so I think there are some valid concerns about the
implications
> this change will have on vandalism management.
>
> Does nobody else see the issues associated with having what little
guidance
> there is about IPv6 locked into pages in user space on a single
project,
> when this is a global change?
>
Risker, I think you're over-reacting here. Yes, there are risks
associated with IPv6. No, they haven't been addressed completely
before IPv6 day (apparently because of the very late moment the
decision to participate was taken). But it hasn't destroyed the
projects so far and chances are, by the time IPv6 vandalism will have
any significant effect, they will be solved (estimates are that 50% of
the Internet users will have IPv6 only in 6 years [1]).
I will compare this with the SOPA blackout (and the equivalent event
on it.wp). Back then, there were people talking about the negative
effects the blackout will have on the credibility of Wikipedia. The
blackout happened and passed without any significant drop in
pageviews, but with huge media and popular attention.
IPv6 is now in a stage where it needs that kind of attention. There
are only 3 countries in the world with more than 1% of IPv6 users
[2][3], and in one of them there are still troubles with the new
protocol. If there is little content available on IPv6, people will
not even be aware it exists and they will not demand it from their
ISP, which means there will be no users for IPv6 content making it
useless and the loop will continue. Someone had to break this loop and
the content providers were the easiest place this could happen.
It is good to have people aware of the problems ahead, but just crying
wolf does not really help.
I have never said that moving to IPv6 is a bad idea. What I am
complaining about is the dismissive attitude taken toward the volunteers
that are stuck cleaning up the mess when Engineering decides to do
something, apparently on the spur of the moment, without telling anyone
outside their own little walled garden. It would have taken one email
to
the Checkuser mailing list two months ago saying "We're really serious
about trying to get IPv6 up and running for June 5" and people would have
been pulling together the resources and making the software changes for
the
various tools we use. But no, we're told we're being wimps for having
the
nerve to complain that we've just been steamrollered, and that advance
notice and the opportunity to plan are unimportant. Bluntly put, you're
not the ones cleaning up the mess, we are; our job is easier if we have
time to order in the extra mops.
Earlier, Erik said: "Regarding privacy, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can
be
dangerously
revealing in terms of personal identity (e.g. some ISPs even tie
street address information to your IPv4 address). It's always been
fundamentally problematic that MediaWiki reveals this information
nakedly, and it's what enabled past large-scale investigations like
WikiScanner, for good and for ill. In the mid to long term, I believe
we need to investigate moving away from full disclosure of IP
addresses when editing without logging in, but this is independent of
IPv4/IPv6."
Do this now, please. Even I can see how easy it ought to be to replace
the last
three digits of an IPv4 address with XXX in publicly viewable lists
and logs....and reduce the publicly visible IPv6 string to its first
three segments.
It's not. This is not something simple to do technically.
The first thing you have to get out of the way is the fact that we only
have one api interface where a user attached ip comes from.
This is used by both internals and public facing things. This means we
can't make tweaks in single spots to deal with this. If the system didn't
completely fall apart from the attempt, then at the least every single ip
block would become a range block.
So with the possibility of a simple backend change out of the way there's
only one other option. Change the public facing places where ips are used.
Except ips are used every single place a user name is used. So every place
a user name is used needs to be changed. It needs to understand the
difference between an ip and a username and needs to do something
different for the ip.
The problem there however is that we have numerous places this is done in.
This is not something simple to do because it would require whoever takes
this task on to go through our entire huge codebase and track down every
spot a username is used, figure it if it's public facing or internal, and
then modify it. Inevitably spots are going to be missed and this will
become a continual game of duck taping hole after hole in a boat that
looks like swiss cheese.
And this gets worse when you think of one other factor. Extensions.
MediaWiki isn't the only thing that displays this stuff. Extensions do to.
That means that not only does our massive core need to be modified, but
every extension needs to be modified as well.
And that's just the technical issue. What happens to our anon talkpages
and contribution lists when all this information disappears? I doubt that
sysops are the only people who deal with users from individual ips.
This isn't a simple technical issue to solve. Whatever we do is going to
require a large change to the MediaWiki codebase to even function. More to
work the way it really should. And likely actually going to require
restructuring how MediaWiki handles some things and getting rid of some of
the assumptions made in code.
But before that. It's going to require someone coming forward with a
really good idea on how we can have MediaWiki work with anonymous
contributions in the ideal way.
That will suffice until a brighter idea comes to the fore. The
WMF projects are the *only* major user-interactive website that takes
this
cavalier attitude toward what the rest of the world is increasingly
viewing
as personal information, and about 30% of the suppression requests coming
in at English Wikipedia relate to IP addresses of users who accidentally
edit logged out, or new users who didn't really understand that their IP
would show when they edited.
The issues I point out with the IPv6 transition are social issues.
Nobody
expects Engineering to go all touchy-feely. But we do expect to be
treated
with respect. Next time, give us a month or two of warning. And please
don't insult people by pretending this was a spur of the moment decision:
the more I read, the more clear it is that for months IPv6 Day was the
target for bringing this online.
Best,
Risker
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
