Has any thought been given to detecting potentially vandalistic edits
and quarantining them for review by experienced editors? I know there
are bots and tools to do this after the fact, but what about before
it? What I like about this idea is that it wouldn't suffer from the
typical "build a better rat trap, get smarter rats" problem, since
most of our vandals are (I believe) first-timers.
So, why not just have MediaWiki apply a simple heuristic for detecting
vandalistic edits? Presumably edits containing more than one
consecutive !, words like "gay", "penis" or "loser" are
unlikely to be
genuine. It should then silently quarantine them (possibly even
attempting to fool the vandal into believing that his misdeed has paid
off). There are probably all sorts of rules you could come up with,
including anons substantially reducing the length of pages, adding
nothing but a single URL etc.
Might temper some of those "but Wikipedia must be free!" complaints.
Steve
On 2/3/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
Although vandalism has been slashed by
semi-protection on that
article, non-vandalism edits also seem to be down by about 60%. Does
that mean that semi-protection is wrong for George W. Bush? I think
the jury is still out, but it appears that there is considerable
collateral damage associated with semi-protection.
As examples of bad cases making bad rules, [[George W. Bush]] is the
winner. It is *the* most edited article on en.wikipedia, by what? 5:1
over the next one? It pretty clearly has *too many* editors for the
live version ever to be a usable encyclopaedia article.
Remember that *most articles are not controversial*. And that Kim
Bruning and Gmaxwell's data indicates there are only a couple of
hundred articles out of 900,000 that have more than a hundred editors.
Kim's idea that we should just declare those couple of hundred
articles prima facie pathological until proven otherwise strikes me as
an *excellent* one.
Saying anything about the value of semiprotection based on such
articles only really applies to such articles. And semiprotection
should be thought of as an extreme measure, but [[George W. Bush]] is
a pathological article.
- d.
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