The Trades Union Congress today decided that employers should re-consider the blocking of various social networking sites, with particular emphasis on Facebook. It seems that rather sort more important issues like the striking of prison staff, they would argue this instead…

“It’s unreasonable for employers to try to stop their staff from having a life outside work, just because they can’t get their heads around the technology.”

I disagree with the banning of web-pages in the workplace anyway, if the employees are completing their work at the level expected and hitting deadlines on time then there is no reason. If they are missing them or not producing great work, then if these social networking sites are to blame, then I see no problems in removing access to them. I’m of the work ethic that if your at work your being paid to be there and work, not play around on social networking for extensive time periods.

However its a double edged sword, block access to social networking sites and you could upset your employees so much that their work levels drop even more than they were previously.

I’m glad I work from home and therefore I have to regulate my internet access myself, and as long as I get my work done to the required level and I don’t miss my deadlines, the odd 5minutes here and there don’t hurt. I would say to a point that it does improve my work as I take mini-breaks which take my mind off complex tasks, so when I come back I have a semi-fresh mindset again.

Overall though, I think the unions should be arguing over more important issues than this.

Wow.. been a while since I have posted on my blog… I wonder if anyone actually reads it. Anyway, the reasons of why I haven’t been posting will be addressed in another article, which will be… sometime .

So, anyone who reads or uses Wikipedia knows that one of the problems of allowing anyone to edit articles is exactly that. It is plagued by idiots editing, defacing and blanking documents at an almost guaranteed once a minute. Recently after trying to browse an article, instead of receiving the information I wanted, I ended up with some bastardised version with various spews of wisdom from a random individual. After managing to work out how to undo this and revert the article back to its last normal state I got into the habit of fixing random articles as they were vandalised. Soon enough after I had been reverting articles I noticed a pattern with people vandalising the pages, if someone’s defaced one article chances are they have (or will) do the same to another.

Now on Wikipedia this is easy enough to do as you just watch the users “Contributions” page, and see what they change. However if you are monitoring (or patrolling as the Wikipedians like to call it) the Recent Changes page, you may end up with about 10-20 editors in the space of 30 minutes of watching, and keeping track of all of their changes is somewhat problematic as refreshing that many contribution pages is just a waste of time. By the time you have refreshed them all you’d have to start again instantly just to keep up.

With Wikipedia now reaching nearly 2 million English articles, this problem of people thinking its smart or clever to randomly change and deface articles will only increase. So I have decided to try and do something to help out…

Wikipedia Vandalism Watch v1.0.0.1

This is a Windows application coded in Visual C#, and its sole purpose is to monitor specified users’ contributions pages. If it detects a top edit (i.e. what is currently being displayed to the world) within the past 10 minutes it will flag it for you, and allow you to directly open the diff’s for the specific article. All you need to do is add users who you think will deface an article and it will monitor them for you. When it scans for edits it will present its results in a table so you can easily see what has changed.

If you have no-one to monitor and you just want to see how the program works add the user “ClueBot” and select “Force Scan” from the menu in the top left. This will usually have at least 1 top edit every 10minutes and will provide results for you to see. ClueBot is an automated bot which attempts to fix various obvious vandalism such as page blanking.

Thanks go to…

Murray-Mint for some tips and pointers of how to start coding in C#
Cheez for helping with the regular expression of doom for finding edits

Download

This application comes with no guarantees and therefore, you use this software at your own personal risk.

Download (78kb) – Wikipedia Vandalism Watch – wikipedia-vandalism-watch_v1.0.0.1.zip