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Comment Re:Odd ruling (Score 1) 228

Since the details of the switch haven't been published, I have no view on its merits. It sounds more like a wi-fi jammer than something that will actually kill the internet.

This court case is not about the merits of the system but about whether the details should be published. The exceptions for things related to security where lives could be at risk by publishing seem to clearly apply.

Comment Re:Why always a back door (Score 4, Informative) 228

I think prejudice refers to whether or not you can make the claims again. If a claim is dismissed because it is without merit, it will usually be with prejudice, meaning any future claim on that point will be consisted pre-judged and dismissed. If a claim is dismissed due to some procedural issue, it may be without prejudice so you can try again later.

Whether or not you have leave to appeal is separate.

Comment Private spaceflight is more interesting (Score 2) 229

China is only slightly ahead of private spaceflight, which makes it hard for me to be impressed. Give it 3 or 4 years, and private companies will be able to do more impressive stuff than China. At that point, it will just be a matter of having enough money (it's not much more than that now, really).

That, and launching women into space isn't actually any more difficult than launching men (you have to design the spacesuits a little differently, but that's trivial). When the first women were launched into space, it was a triumph for equality, but sexism isn't really China's biggest problem (well, not after birth, any way).

Comment What's the margin of error? (Score 1) 325

What is the margin of error on those browser stats? I doubt a 1% drop from one month to the next is statistically significant.

Even if it is, it was inevitable that there would be a drop. Only IE users get the choice screen and it would be incredible if they all chose IE, so some people are going to switch from IE to something else. A 1% drop sounds extremely small to me, but I'm not sure how far the choice screen has rolled out yet.

Comment Re:Been done? (Score 1) 116

No, they solve very different problems. Something like Huggle needs to work out if a given edit can be almost guaranteed *not* to be vandalism (usually because the editor is on a whitelist), everything else gets shown to a human. The important thing for something like Huggle is making it easy for humans to review edits, not judging the edits automatically in any way. Something like ClueBot needs to work out if it can almost guarantee that a given edit *is* vandalism. They are very different.

Comment Re:Existing (Score 2, Insightful) 116

In that paper, you say you think high-recall (ie. low false negatives) should be preferred to high-precision (low false positives) since it reduces the chance of a reader seeing a vandalised version. I disagree. You underestimate the harm caused by losing editors that get annoyed when their legitimate edits are reverted by a bot. The upcoming feature, Flagged Revisions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions ), will provide a much better way of preventing readers from seeing vandalised versions while not costing us useful editors.

Comment Re:What counts as vandalism on Wikipedia? (Score 3, Insightful) 116

Officially, vandalism is defined as edits made in bad faith. If you are trying to improve the article but are an idiot (which includes people that don't realise their own bias), that isn't vandalism, it's just idiocy. It is only if you are editing with the intention of making the article worse that you are vandalising.

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