[WikiEN-l] An actual RC patrol? (was Openness is a means to an end. Nothing more)

Thu Dec 1 17:34:17 UTC 2005

--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would it be an idea to make RC patrol organised, i.e. people (admins
> or not) sign on for shifts, checking all edits in a given block of
> time? Two patrollers for each time period should be enough, three or
> four for evenings US time. You do RC patrol - would something like
> this make sense?

What we need are teams of people working together in a way that minimizes duplicated effort. As
is, there is no way to know if a diff has been looked at once before, never before, or 200 times.
There is also no way to know what was being looked at (simple vandalism, subtle vandalism,
accuracy, etc). Knowing at least the first part (how many times a diff has been looked at) will
help a great deal. Sorting RC based on that would be even better. 

Better still would be to sort RC and similar lists based on trust networks. For example, I trust
you and many other people. So edits either made by you and diffs checked by you should be OK in my
eyes. It would be nice if my RC and similar lists de-emphasized your edits and edits checked by
you. This could go one step farther: I trust your ability to judge whether or not other people are
trustworthy. So it would be nice if I could trust by proxy all the users you trust. This creates a
trust network. 

This could also be done P2P via an offline editor and thus minimize server load. The offline
editor would do all the sorting after downloading raw data from Wikipedia.

I think it is obvious that we need bigger and better guns to fight vandals. 

-- mav

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