abian added a comment.
In T213300#5565206 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T213300#5565206>, @Uzume wrote: > I do not think this is a good idea. This amounts to security through obscurity <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q133735> and in general is not a good practice. The same data could be found in a number of other ways (e.g., api.php which would be even more useful to a potential vandal bot) and in the end does nothing to actually prevent any vandalism to begin with (just attempts to deter it by obscuring which pages have the most links). Also unconfirmed users (e.g., anonymous IPs) might have valid reasons to what to know which pages are most linked. We already punish such editors enough for the faults of troublemakers. I do not see this as a great way to protect our content from vandalism and it definitely punishes other users. > These pages should likely already be well known to administrators that will have added protections to them and obscuring which pages they are adds little. We have pages such as Special:UnwatchedPages, which only administrators can read; for Special:MostLinkedPages I'm proposing something considerably more open, but still reasonable in my opinion. The practice of security through obscurity cannot be applied systematically, but neither can its opposite (making all information equally obvious to everyone). You must not share your password and it's not reasonable to ask you to let me see it because security through obscurity "in general is a not a good practice", we should consider the circumstances of each particular case: for this one, the usefulness of the page for a well-intentioned user who is not confirmed versus a malicious one, and the ease of a well-intentioned user without the confirmed status to get that status. It's not true that "[this measure] in the end does nothing to actually prevent any vandalism", the ease of doing something (good or bad) on a website is strongly correlated with the probability/frequency with which people do it even when it's always possible to carry out that action. I think it's a bit pessimistic to say that not being able to read the page is a punishment for unconfirmed users, since we could legitimately interpret access to the page as a prize for carrying out the test edits instead. I also think it's quite exaggerated to talk about a punishment; if the special page didn't exist, or if it suddenly disappeared, most people wouldn't miss it... and unconfirmed users surely wouldn't be the ones crying. :-) TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T213300 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: abian Cc: Uzume, Lydia_Pintscher, Addshore, Aklapper, abian, darthmon_wmde, DannyS712, Nandana, Lahi, Gq86, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, LawExplorer, _jensen, rosalieper, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Mbch331
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