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Wikipedia: "blocked from editing" ???


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I'm a little confused about something, it's probably nothing, but maybe someone can clarify this for me. I opened wikipedia today and saw that I had an old message that I've never seen before. Strange because I don't have, nor have I ever had an account there. It said "You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at Kamikaze (Eminem album).  Robvanvee 07:42, 17 November 2018 (UTC)".

So naturally I'm like, huh? what? I don't even listen to Eminem, and I've never even been on that page before... It said that if it's a "shared IP address" I should create an account, to avoid this in the future... Huh?

Also, how come if I check the geolocation of my IP address it says I live in Accra, which is not where I live... Not even the correct region? Or did Wikipedia just block every vodafone user who lives in a 100 km radius of Accra because some snotnose messed with one of their pages? 

1016383322_ScreenShot2019-02-14at19_44.17copy.thumb.jpg.4e89b0508b6a7b54d52b61a9804bf61b.jpg

"Wiki Loves Africa", hahaha, ok :drukqs:...

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3 hours ago, Sundiata said:

Also, how come if I check the geolocation of my IP address it says I live in Accra, which is not where I live... Not even the correct region? Or did Wikipedia just block every vodafone user who lives in a 100 km radius of Accra because some snotnose messed with one of their pages? 

geoip mostly shows the location pretty rough only.

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1 hour ago, Imarok said:

geoip mostly shows the location pretty rough only.

ok, thanks.

Any Idea on what the rest means? Because the IP address they mention does match mine. Supposedly the message is from 17 November 2018, 3 months ago (which is also weird), so if that's true I guess my IP address hasn't changed since then. So I can assume it is genuinely addressed to me, which is so weird, because I've never tried to change anything on wikipedia before, let alone pages for a music album I never even listened to... My IP address isn't shared with anyone, and no one has physical access to my laptop or phone, ever... Neither to my network. 

It's just a bit startling, because when I look up the warning messages, I got the most severe warning in those respective categories. Like a "category 4 warning" or something:

1791788137_ScreenShot2019-02-15at01_15.04copy.thumb.jpg.a9095a4fcd42e9294be2c8bda3dfd881.jpg

1909477833_ScreenShot2019-02-15at01_15.51copy.thumb.jpg.b5672e51d1821901818edf28722b354c.jpg

 

Considering that was 3 months ago, I might already be blocked, without warning, as the message says...

That Robvanvee dude, the guy who sent me the message is a member of the "Counter Vandalism Unit", and he even has an "Anti Vandalism Barnstar", whatever that may mean... I don't know this guy or why he is targeting my IP address. I think this is all very strange...

228727148_ScreenShot2019-02-15at01_35.44copy.thumb.jpg.2254d18a2523de8f41fdbb93807f18df.jpg

I just thought someone here might know a little more about how these aspects of wikipedia work, because there wasn't even an option to appeal this.

I wanted to create an account and do some work on their Kushite wiki pages, because they're a mess, but I wonder how that will go down if the first thing those people see is an IP address that is flagged for vandalism...  

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18 minutes ago, nani said:

In the worst case maybe you have a virus and  was using your email to create a legit Wikipedia account to edit stuff /:

Are such viruses common on MacBooks? I've never had messages about a virus before, and I'm not the most risky internet user either...

Maybe my phone? But I use that even less for anything... Just WhatsApp and random google searches... Nothing risky...

Edited by Sundiata
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9 hours ago, nani said:

In the worst case maybe you have a virus and  was using your email to create a legit Wikipedia account to edit stuff /:

I don't think so.

I'd just ignore the message as long as you aren't banned from writing. If you are banned from writing, I guess there is some Wikipedia discussion page for resolving such issues.

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3 hours ago, cloud9 said:

Wikipedia bans IP ranges as opposed to specific IPs usually. It’s unlikely you or your machine did the vandalism.

Jesus Christ, you're right! These people are blocking thousands of IP addresses at a time because of individual offenders, and they get rewarded for it too!

 

14 hours ago, Sundiata said:

Or did Wikipedia just block every vodafone user who lives in a 100 km radius of Accra because some snotnose messed with one of their pages? 

I thought this was a ridiculous assumption but it seems to be what actually happened... Wow... I'm speechless.

This definitely affects the way I see Wikipedia... There's a ton of justifiably upset and even outraged wikipedia users and editors who have been caught up in these kind of dragnet operations. And the Admins doing the blocking, literally blocking thousands of people at a time because of a single rotten apple, are super arrogant and dismissive! What a bunch of @#$%ers... 

Why in the world would you be allowed to edit anything, anywhere, without having an account in the first place. I get that wikipedia is bit special, but this is just stupid!

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9 hours ago, Sundiata said:

I wanted to create an account

I'd suggest just trying that, before you're lamenting over spilled milk which actually might not even be spilled. ;)

AFAIK those ip-bans aren't very precise and I guess the handling is automatic, so maybe it doesn't come down to bad character traits of those admins. They even told you several times to create an account/log in to avoid being caught up in a banned ip range...

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If you don't have a Wikipedia account yet, register one. If you do but your identity has been compromised, request a new one. Vandalism is a serious problem on Wikipedia (thousands of pages are vandalized daily), therefore some articles are protected and sometimes IP addresses are blocked.

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24 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

Why in the world would you be allowed to edit anything, anywhere, without having an account in the first place. I get that wikipedia is bit special, but this is just stupid!

It makes sense to me. Everywhere you go on the web you are being tracked. You can do like most people and ignore it, but some people just don't. They take caution in every website they visit, make sure to never use JavaScript coming from sources they don't trust, use Tor to prevent their network traffic from being intercepted, (Imagine going to the mall with tunnels between each house on the way instead of taking let's say, a car.

Having the right to edit pages without signing in allow you to keep that anonymity. 

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Actually one of the reasons listed at WP:account is:

Quote
  • Edit without revealing your IP address (which can be used to trace your physical location) to the public.

Also:

Quote

Once you have had an account for about 4 days and have made at least 10 edits, you will be allowed to:

Some people use bots to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia uses bots to detect and report vandalism. You can appeal to basically anything on Wikipedia; if you leave a message at the appropiate talk page (there ought to be a link in the warning message), then you prove you're a human person.

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5 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

I'd suggest just trying that, before you're lamenting over spilled milk which actually might not even be spilled. ;)

AFAIK those ip-bans aren't very precise and I guess the handling is automatic, so maybe it doesn't come down to bad character traits of those admins. They even told you several times to create an account/log in to avoid being caught up in a banned ip range...

 

4 minutes ago, Nescio said:

If you don't have a Wikipedia account yet, register one. If you do but your identity has been compromised, request a new one. Vandalism is a serious problem on Wikipedia (thousands of pages are vandalized daily), therefore some articles are protected and sometimes IP addresses are blocked.

I was able to create an account without a problem, it seems (so far). I left a message on Robvanvee's talk page, asking why my IP address was blocked. That's not my issue though. They accused my IP address of vandalism!

They didn't tell me to create an account several times to avoid being caught up in a banned ip range in advance. They blocked me first, only to tell me 3 months later,  and then told me to create an account to avoid being blocked again in the future. It's just insulting and unsettling. I didn't vandalize anything! They just told me I vandalized something, knowing full well that they're banning IP's by the thousands, which means they also know full well that there is probably a less than 0.1% chance that I was actually vandalizing anything. They should never do something like that. Don't accuse people if you know they didn't do anything. At least have the common decency to apologize for the inconvenience and explain that they know you probably didn't do anything. 

Look at wildfire games for example. See how upset people get for being banned even when they actually did something wrong. Now imagine for example how upset people would be if 0AD's admins just decide to ban everyone from Germany because a random German account said a bad word, or ban every Verizon users for the same reason... 

 

23 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

so maybe it doesn't come down to bad character traits of those admins.

A lot of people are very upset/outraged by this. Including actual contributors who have left wikipedia because this. People even get permanently banned because of cartel like actions by some of the admins. The arrogance is serious in some of those admins... How can an individual casually ban thousands of IP's and then be totally blasé about it when so many of their innocent victims are understandably angry. And they award themselves titles and tags for their "valuable" contributions to the community. Yuk... 

 

I still don't understand why in the world people without an account should be allowed to edit anything. You can't even do that on Wildfire Games Forum.

2 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

It makes sense to me. Everywhere you go on the web you are being tracked. You can do like most people and ignore it, but some people just don't. They take caution in every website they visit, make sure to never use JavaScript coming from sources they don't trust, use Tor to prevent their network traffic from being intercepted, (Imagine going to the mall with tunnels between each house on the way instead of taking let's say, a car.

Having the right to edit pages without signing in allow you to keep that anonymity.

I don't understand that. Why would somebody be entitled to anonymity when they are editing the worlds most comprehensive encyclopedia. Unless you're some kind of a political dissident, why would anybody be allowed to be anonymous when editing one of the most frequented sources of information in the world. That's a recipe for disaster, and one of the reasons wikipedia gets a bad rap. It's really inappropriate. It's an encyclopedia, not Chatroulette... 

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Regarding the IP ban:

Most ISPs have a certain pool of IPs. If you are a customer, you mostly get a new address from that pool every night or when you reboot your access router. So it might be that some time ago a spammer had your current IP address. It also makes sense for Wikipedia to block IP ranges, because a spammer can easily get a new IP by rebooting their access router.

 

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12 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

Now imagine for example how upset people would be if 0AD's admins just decide to ban everyone from Germany because a random German account said a bad word, or ban every Verizon users for the same reason...

That sounds familiar...

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1 hour ago, Sundiata said:

I don't understand that. Why would somebody be entitled to anonymity when they are editing the worlds most comprehensive encyclopedia. Unless you're some kind of a political dissident, why would anybody be allowed to be anonymous when editing one of the most frequented sources of information in the world. That's a recipe for disaster, and one of the reasons wikipedia gets a bad rap. It's really inappropriate. It's an encyclopedia, not Chatroulette..

Why would people be anonymous on WikiLeaks ? Everything on Wikipedia can be considered dissident in a given country :)

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14 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Why would people be anonymous on WikiLeaks ? Everything on Wikipedia can be considered dissident in a given country :)

Sure, I get that. But in my opinion who says what is very relevant information. I tend to be innately distrustful of people who try to convince me of something while hiding their identity. 

Whistleblowers are a special case, but even then it's important to do your due diligence and independently verify the claims in so far as that's possible. 

Also, could you imagine our legal systems working like that? Guilt by association is an ugly thing. So are dragnets. Still not entirely sure about what happened though.

Anyway, I got a response... My IP seems to be conflated with that of a user called Michaelcogbill. 1069604928_ScreenShot2019-02-15at14_36.17copy.thumb.jpg.0671a01cbd28885055ac1b66b57a19e2.jpg

 

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@SundiataSorry, I didn't get the whole ~timeline from your posts. Also I was aware of administrative issues at wikipedia, but I didn't know this ip-stuff was one of them.

I've been banned some place because of my ip, and of course I was annoyed but I didn't take it personal. Anyway, I hope it's now resolved completely and you won't be bothered by it anymore. :)

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@Gurken Khan, Yeah it was just really weird... And it's pretty common apparently, and has been upsetting to more than a few people (I saw some pages full of scolding tirades against admins casually blocking thousands of IP addresses)

But then I realized in my case it really wasn't a random dragnet, but actually personal, and I was like:

Spoiler

now-im-pissed-5630bp.jpg.png.b3d63eb22d94fd576e954eb7acf92035.png

Anyone? Anyone?? Ok, I'll just take a seat...

 

The guy replied again, by the way. First he sort of apologized to me for his heavy handed warning, but his second message still kind of implies that he thinks I did it. He told me not to worry about it though, because it was "some time ago", as if he "forgives" me for my passed transgressions... what an a__ hole...

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2 hours ago, Sundiata said:

@Gurken Khan, Yeah it was just really weird... And it's pretty common apparently, and has been upsetting to more than a few people (I saw some pages full of scolding tirades against admins casually blocking thousands of IP addresses)

But then I realized in my case it really wasn't a random dragnet, but actually personal, and I was like:

  Reveal hidden contents

now-im-pissed-5630bp.jpg.png.b3d63eb22d94fd576e954eb7acf92035.png

Anyone? Anyone?? Ok, I'll just take a seat...

 

The guy replied again, by the way. First he sort of apologized to me for his heavy handed warning, but his second message still kind of implies that he thinks I did it. He told me not to worry about it though, because it was "some time ago", as if he "forgives" me for my passed transgressions... what an a__ hole...

Once I was blocked from several chanes(I do not know the term in English)

Spoiler

something curious is that when I look for my ip it says that I am in the capital of guatemala, being that I live in a border town with mexico

 

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