Last modified: 2007-04-02 10:05:07 UTC
To speed the discovery of vandalism, a page that pumps out diffs at a high rate on a specific page may be a good idea. I quote from my post at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals% 29#Wikipedia_Special:Monitor : It would be similar in structure to Slashdot's Meta Moderation (http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl) system: a designated page, perhaps Special:Monitor, would pump out X number of recent diffs made within the last Y days, on one single page, for the purpose of fast eyeballing. This would cut out the "middleman" of Recentchanges for those on janitorial duty; only the refresh button needs to be repeatedly abused in order to view massive amounts of diffs and scan for vandalism at a very fast rate. The number of diffs and timerange to pull from can be user customisable, or fixed at say, 10 diffs per page, pulled from diffs made within the last 5 days. The choosing of whether a diff displays on Monitor can be completely random, or completely random, but "viewed" diffs are never viewed again, or use a probability system. For a more frequently edited/viewed article, the diffs of the article will appear on Monitor more frequently an already viewed diff would have its probability of being chosen for Monitor cut, to say, 1/1000th of the original probability.
Some more ideas: - Only show the latest edits on articles. - An edit is originally marked as "don't know" but can also be marked as "revert", "vfd", "speedy", "keep" etc. - If "don't know" is *not* marked, the edit will never appear on the page again. - A button is pressed to take actions and get a new batch of diffs. - IP edits with blank summaries are the most suspicious. The character count +/- can also be used.
I wasn't really thinking about janitors marking the viewed articles, mainly because it would be quite overheadish; but also because it takes much of the janitor's time, since most edits are minor and legit; it also requires a write to database for every diff viewed. If VfD or rv could be integrated into Monitor, in a bullet-proof manner, and is deemed feasible, I am all for it. However as I see it, besides the problem with overhead, at the least rv integration would be hard to perfect (How many votes rvs? IPs and sock puppets viewing Monitor?), and it would probably introduce vulnerabilities. I don't think it would be safe to allow the Monitor page to have the power to rv a page; but, VfD perhaps could possibly be well combined with Monitor. Enough votes would automatically mark VfD and put article on VfD for manual voting. Sadly, the same can't go for rv, it would be too slow, the VfRDueToMonitorMarks page would be way too crowded. Letting Monitor rv directly would be giving too much power to it.
It could open up a new window. It all depends on what you want to achieve. I thought of it as a more convenient way of doing patrol: thus, it would get changes from (say) bteween 2 and 4 minutes ago. If the monitor people can cope with that then extend it *forwards* so that people can inspect diffs made a second ago; then extend it backwards. I trust people that it should actually revert themselves when they click it. Remember that they know the article title; they can just go and revert it themselves. Similarly with marking for speedy and vfd. It would start with monitoring IP edits with blank summaries, then we could add summaries, then users, then minor edits, and (if people can handle monitoring all that!) that would be perfect: every edit except an admin's patrolled. :)
I'm working on it. I have reached the stage shown in the soon-to-be-uploaded attachment. I have recieved assurance from Tim Starling that such an extension (note, not patch, extension) would be enabled on Wikimedia if {the code was of good quality, it did not modify existing tables, etc, etc}. It's called Special:Confirm. Before I continue with this, I would like to hear from Brion Vibber about this. I assume that's all the opinions I will need to get such a feature onto Wikimedia projects. I created an off-site version, but basically it wasn't very good to use, and also constantly used my server resources parsing the IRC channel into a database. A screenshot of it so far follows.
Attempting to assign to me.
Created attachment 638 [details] The page so far Since the off-site version is down, you can't see the actions bar of the left. This is what it looks like so far. It supports checking edits (note: not page creations) and does the rather basic filtering of not checking bot edits.
Note that to keep the bug tracking list happy, wikibugs-l *must* be in the CC list if you reassign.
Created attachment 639 [details] Further progress New pages are now recognised. The user link goes to Special:Contributions for that user. Images are automatically changed from [[Image:This.jpg]] to [[:Image:This.jpg]] on display - i.e. they are linked to, not included. This works for local and canonical namespace names. :)
Created attachment 648 [details] Actions column It looks beautiful - it's the actions column! "Edit stacking" is the next part and it's pretty difficult. :)
Note the existence of the Patroller extension (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Patroller) which provides functionality very similar to that described above.
