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2024:Program/Trust and Safety Product 1/2: Getting Better at Blocking Bad Activity on the Wikis

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Session title: Trust and Safety Product 1/2: Getting Better at Blocking Bad Activity on the Wikis

Session type: Lecture
Track: Community Health
Language: en

The Wikis rely heavily on IP blocking as a mechanism for blocking vandalism, spam, and abuse. But IP addresses are increasingly less useful as stable identifiers of an individual actor, and blocking IP addresses has unintended negative effects on good faith users who happen to share the same IP address as bad actors. The talk discusses approaches to improve the effectiveness of these mechanisms.

Description

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The combination of the decreasing stability of IP addresses and our heavy reliance on IP blocking result in less precision and effectiveness in targeting bad actors, in combination with increasing levels of collateral damage for good faith users. We want to see the opposite situation: decreased levels of collateral damage and increased precision in mitigations targeting bad actors. To better support the anti-abuse work of functionaries and to provide building blocks for reuse in existing (e.g. CheckUser, Special:Block) and new tools, we are working on exploring ways to reliably associate an individual with their actions (sockpuppetting mitigation), and combine existing signals (e.g. IP addresses, account history, request attributes) to allow for more precise targeting of actions on bad actors.

Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r2AQ8VnH_o&t=3176

How does your session relate to the event theme, Collaboration of the Open?

This session talks about what goes into protecting the integrity of open collaboration. Platforms for open collaboration are unfortunately easy targets for abuse of all sorts. Constant efforts are required to ensure that vandalism, DDoS, and various forms of scaled attacks do not compromise the availability of these platforms or the legitimacy of the content on them.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

This session is for an experienced audience

Etherpad link

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WM2024_Day1_Ochrid_Room_9

Resources

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Speakers

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  • William Brown
I am known as Dreamy Jazz on WMF projects.
Professionally, I'm a part of the Trust and Safety Product team.
  • Kosta Harlan