Last modified: 2007-08-31 08:59:21 UTC
Bug 3712 comment #10 had a very interesting suggestion that's applicable to all WMF wikis, not just Commons. Basically, have a couple of buttons (or just one) for users to flag things as defamatory or a copyright violation. Every other site of user-submitted content has had these for ages, but as far as I know we never considered them. This is probably because, after all, we're a wiki, so the anons can just edit the things out, but there are several advantages to specific buttons: 1) Many people don't seem to "get" that they can edit every page, despite the friendly-looking buttons and taglines and everything. 2) Even if they do, they may be scared away by all that fixed-width wikitext with crazy punctuation marks everywhere. 3) Anyone who did edit a page to remove large chunks of content would probably be reverted nowadays by Tawkerbot or something, at least on enwiki, and there goes any chance of their trying that again. 4) It's quicker to just hit a button, which plays to the fact that most anons aren't going to be terribly committed to rooting out bad stuff from Wikipedia. 5) It's best to delete or oversight libel in particular, not just blank it, so notification of admins is necessary. Presumably the buttons would go to a special page, which would put the stuff in a table, that could then be called up by anyone to go ahead and delete or AFD or whatever they like. It could then be removed from the list somehow once it had been dealt with, preferably only by sysops or other trusted users. For privacy and to make people more willing to submit reports, it might be best to hide IPs even for anonymous reporters, keeping them accessible only to sysops or checkusers or what have you.
What if someone went around tagging articles that they were defamatory, when in fact they were not? Who has permission to clear that status, if it's found to not be a copyvio, etc? What if someone were to properly tag an article as bad, then someone wanted the article to stay, so they simply cleared it? I see where you're coming from, but I also see a huge potential for abuse. I think as it stands, the current system of templates and whatnot works fine.
hm... a "quick tag" feature sounds like a nice idea... basically, there could be an extension that adds links/buttons that add a template. shouldn't be too hard to do, should it?
(In reply to comment #1) > What if someone went around tagging articles that they were defamatory, when in fact they were > not? Who has permission to clear that status, if it's found to not be a copyvio, etc? What if > someone were to properly tag an article as bad, then someone wanted the article to stay, so they > simply cleared it? The answer to all of the above: "it's a wiki". ;) (In reply to comment #2) > hm... a "quick tag" feature sounds like a nice idea... basically, there could be > an extension that adds links/buttons that add a template. shouldn't be too hard > to do, should it? It might be better to have a more centralized paper trail, but that would be a straightforward way to do it, yes. I was thinking more like a few special pages and a log. That would potentially allow admins to track things better. So maybe: * Special:Report/pagename: Adds a "reported" flag to the article (and logs it), with an optional summary message. Accessible through a button on every page, which ideally wouldn't require any page reloads for capable UAs (to make it as effortless as possible). Reports may or may not show up on the page, maybe add an interface message to the top that can be left empty. * Special:Reportedpages: Lists all pages that have been reported and not cleared. * Special:Unreport/pagename: Removes a "reported" flag from the article (and logs it), with an optional summary message. Only accessible via direct access, or from Special:Reportedpages, so it's not immediately obvious to random people how to unreport a page (could be linked from the "this page is reported" message). * Special:Log would of course have report/unreport sections added. Interested users could keep track of the unreport logs to spot suspicious stuff like anons unreporting, so they can review it. And two new permissions would be added: 'report' and 'unreport', probably by default * for report and autoconfirmed for unreport.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1189 ***
