WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIStransgressor was: “You will be blocked from editing the next time you vandalize a page, as you did with thisedit to 808s & Heartbreak”.In Wikipedia, the hardest sanction is the block of the transgressor. This sanction is only applied by theadministrators who have the technical and social authority to issue temporary blocks. However the editors thatanalyze the incidents have the possibility to make formal ban requests to administrators using the AIV(Wikipedia: Administrator intervention against vandalism) page. In the case study, the transgressor wasindicated to AIV and, after one more vandalism, he was blocked by an administrator.Tools, as Huggle and Twinkle, aid the vandal fighters during the enforcement process in Wikipedia. Thetools both monitor events and help to analyze the incidents considering the profile and history of transgressors.They also support the damage recovery and may suggest sanctions to be applied to the transgressor based onpredetermined list; however the decision is always made by the editors who operate the tools.Not always an incident characterizes a norm infraction. An incident can be generated due to an error orwrong configuration of some automatic components, for example components that support the Monitoringactivity. An incident can occur because a norm is ambiguous and a member did not understand it.Furthermore, an incident can occur because the subject is not addressed by any norm. In these cases, anincident is called an unexpected event and has to be managed. The Unexpected Event Handling activity dealswith unexpected events, for example, the procedure may include the correction of the faulty component andthe proposition or update of norms.In order to perform the enforcement activities, some roles in the Access Control of the community systemcan be identified. The Monitoring can be performed by resource administrators that are responsible toguarantee the integrity of the community resources. A committee of resource administrators can conduct theAnalyses activity. The Sanction Application activity can be executed by user administrators that configure thepermissions of the users over the resources. The Damage Recovery activity can be performed by resourceadministrators that recover the resource to a valid version. Depending on the damage severity, such as denialof service, the support of technical analysts can be needed to recover the corruption. Due to the unforeseennature of the Unexpected Event Handling activity, all the mentioned roles can participate: a resourceadministrator can update a resource configuration, a user administrator can correct a wrong member profile,and a technical analyst can improve an automatic component. Besides, in the Unexpected Event Handlingactivity, norm administrators can be necessary to coordinate the suggestions of new norms and the correctionsof established norms, by guaranteeing the community consensus.With respect to access control, for example, Wikipedia defines some roles related to enforcement:administrators, bureaucrats and stewards. There are specific permissions regarding sanction application, suchas block (to block an IP address, user name or range of IPS from editing) and userrights (to change the usergroups of a user). There are also permissions related to damage recovery, such as purge (to purge a page) androllback (to revert a bad editing).4. DISCUSSIONSThe enforcement activities are regulated by the Enforcement Norms and are implemented as detailedoperations using the Enforcement Procedures. The procedures are performed by members of the communityassigned to specific roles in the Access Control, in general known as managers or administrators. TheEnforcement Procedures can make use of tools to assist the managers. So, managers and tools work togetherto accomplish the whole enforcement process. In general managers are volunteers as all members in selforganizingvirtual communities. These managers use the system to perform the enforcement operations;therefore, they must be seen as non-malicious members in Figure 2. The process to become a manager can bevery rigorous, as occurs in Wikipedia (Forte and Bruckman, 2008).The Monitoring can be made manually by members of the community or it can be made automaticallyusing bots, as Wikipedia does in some articles’ editions (Geiger, 2009). The choice between humans or botsdepends basically on the possibility of an automatic detection and its development cost. Priedhorsky et al.(2007) comment about the difficult to detect automatically some infractions in Wikipedia, for instance thedetection of misinformation (article with false information) is almost impossible, because it requiresunderstanding the article content.132