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Used to be that getahuman[1] was a thing, but like all good things on the Internet it seems to have not been able to hold up to the sheer volume of bad actors.

Used to be that getahuman[1] was a thing, but like all good things on the Internet it seems to have not been able to hold up to the sheer volume of bad actors. [1] https://gethuman.com/ https://gethuman.com/

foobarbecue 7y ago
Except for the miracle of Wikipedia
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Kind of, but I wonder about niche articles with nobody keeping an eye on them. I have notifications for a small page that contains some empirical formulas which contain arbitrary constants. Every now and then, somebody will modify one of them so it looks similar but is completely wrong. What if I wasn't keeping an eye on it? Readers would never know they were seeing wrong information.
  - lsiebert 7y ago
    I mean, if human culture didn't scale because there were more bad actors than good, we wouldn't have ever developed any technology, because stone age assholes would have smashed it. The issue is when bad stuff is easy and rewarding, and good stuff is hard because of systemic reasons. Like robocalls, or campaign finance reform. So the fact that those changes are occasional and caused by individual humans, and you can, I believe, revert them more easily than they can make the changes, is a good sign. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow.
  - jborichevskiy 7y ago
    I’d be curious to hear more about this. No need to link the page, but: - is Wikipedia’s reputation system useful for preventing this sort of abuse? I thought most changes have to be approved? - how would one go about establishing the validity of a page from first glance? One thought I had is a browser extension which colors text according to its age on the page; relative to other text
    - Stratoscope 7y ago
      No, in general, changes to Wikipedia do not have to be approved. Anyone can edit and their changes go live immediately. You don't even need an account! But if you edit without an account, your IP address is recorded in the edit history. Accounts are recommended both for that reason and because an account gives you a contribution history and a "talk page" where other Wikipedians can communicate with you. Why don't you try it and see? Find a page where you can make a minor and non-controversial improvement: clarify some wording without changing the meaning, fix a grammar or punctuation error, etc. Create an account, make the change, and watch it go live! The check and balance here isn't that you need approval, but that others with an interest in the page will be watching for changes, and you may find your change reverted if some other editor doesn't like it. Of course if no one is watching the page, then you may have the problem lopmotr referred to.
      - OJFord 7y ago
        The weird thing to me is that IP bans supersede being logged-in to an account. So even if you're logged in, you can't edit from a large corporate/etc. network or commercial VPN.

foobarbecue 7y ago

Except for the miracle of Wikipedia

lopmotr 7y ago
Kind of, but I wonder about niche articles with nobody keeping an eye on them. I have notifications for a small page that contains some empirical formulas which contain arbitrary constants. Every now and then, somebody will modify one of them so it looks similar but is completely wrong. What if I wasn't keeping an eye on it? Readers would never know they were seeing wrong information.
- lsiebert 7y ago
  I mean, if human culture didn't scale because there were more bad actors than good, we wouldn't have ever developed any technology, because stone age assholes would have smashed it. The issue is when bad stuff is easy and rewarding, and good stuff is hard because of systemic reasons. Like robocalls, or campaign finance reform. So the fact that those changes are occasional and caused by individual humans, and you can, I believe, revert them more easily than they can make the changes, is a good sign. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow.
- jborichevskiy 7y ago
  I’d be curious to hear more about this. No need to link the page, but: - is Wikipedia’s reputation system useful for preventing this sort of abuse? I thought most changes have to be approved? - how would one go about establishing the validity of a page from first glance? One thought I had is a browser extension which colors text according to its age on the page; relative to other text
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    No, in general, changes to Wikipedia do not have to be approved. Anyone can edit and their changes go live immediately. You don't even need an account! But if you edit without an account, your IP address is recorded in the edit history. Accounts are recommended both for that reason and because an account gives you a contribution history and a "talk page" where other Wikipedians can communicate with you. Why don't you try it and see? Find a page where you can make a minor and non-controversial improvement: clarify some wording without changing the meaning, fix a grammar or punctuation error, etc. Create an account, make the change, and watch it go live! The check and balance here isn't that you need approval, but that others with an interest in the page will be watching for changes, and you may find your change reverted if some other editor doesn't like it. Of course if no one is watching the page, then you may have the problem lopmotr referred to.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      The weird thing to me is that IP bans supersede being logged-in to an account. So even if you're logged in, you can't edit from a large corporate/etc. network or commercial VPN.