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valid." Dragons flight expressed appreciation to
Garrett and the other developers who helped address the problem, while also expressing frustration with the process. Reflecting on the energy devoted to getting the bot approved, he commented, "A good idea, that can be shown to work, should not require this much effort."
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Once the cascading protection feature had been added to MediaWiki, Dragons flight withdrew the request on 11 January. Although he said the bot "has certain functionality that exceeds that provided by Werdna's patch, I feel the technical situation has changed too greatly for this RFA to continue to be
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Cascading protection operates as follows: If a page is protected using the feature, any pages included in it will also be protected for as long as they remain included in it. This protection should take effect instantly and automatically even if templates are included dynamically by a mechanism such
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Garrett, who came up with the solution, was actually one of those opposing the request for adminship. In his opinion, "this kind of thing needs to be implemented as part of MediaWiki", along with some of the other functions filled by bots. Others pointed out that the small number of developers makes
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At the time the request was withdrawn, there was actually a decent possibility that it would have succeeded. Counts of supporting and opposing comments at the time of withdrawal showed 185 in favor and 41 opposing, with 13 neutral or abstaining comments. Weighing supporters against opponents would
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A substantial portion of the opposition expressed concern that the source code for the bot was not public. Dragons flight did share the code with a number of other
Wikipedians, but declined to release it generally, stating that it could easily be modified to create a vandalbot. Others remained
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As a very high-traffic page, the Main Page has long been an attractive target for vandals. Because it includes a constantly changing variety of elements, vulnerabilities have occasionally appeared when nobody thinks to protect a new element, or even an element of an element. The feature, which
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has been implemented. Dubbed "cascading protection", it automatically applies to local images and templates, which have been frequent targets for this type of vandalism.
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of bot status, which was generally supported, but it was suggested that the issue of a bot with administrator abilities needed to be brought before a wider audience.
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software and applied cascading protection to the Main Page at 09:55 (UTC) on 14 January.
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put 82% in favor, slightly above the 80% threshold that has commonly been treated by
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Vibber pointed out that cascading protection does not apply to images hosted on the
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A new software feature to guard against sophisticated "indirect" vandalism of the
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uncertain about giving a bot abilities normally reserved for administrators.
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The feature was developed while a separate effort was underway to run a
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as justifying administrator status without controversy.
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375:If your comment has not appeared here, you can try
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386:No comments yet. Yours could be the first!
455:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2007-01
18:Knowledge (XXG):Knowledge (XXG) Signpost
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405:: doing it for free since 2005.
371:add the page to your watchlist
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150:). Chief Technical Officer
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242:Arbitrator interviews
195:request for adminship
368:To follow comments,
318:Cascading protection
246:Cascading protection
199:request for approval
162:as that used by the
31:Cascading protection
338:Features and admins
262:Features and admins
236:Also this week: —
363:Discuss this story
348:Arbitration report
313:Arbitration series
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154:enabled it in the
379:purging the cache
343:Technology report
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171:Wikimedia Commons
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295:15 January 2007
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308:2006 in review
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258:Press coverage
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238:2006 in review
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152:Brion Vibber
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127:Michael Snow
57:PDF download
437:Suggestions
333:In the news
270:Arbitration
211:bureaucrats
148:User:Werdna
107:X (Twitter)
266:Technology
131:Simetrical
45:Share this
40:Contribute
22:2007-01-15
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