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

Thu Dec 1 17:48:38 UTC 2005

On 12/1/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.

This "trust network" sounds not entirely different to the whitelist on
CDVF.  It shouldn't be too difficult to create a shared whitelist that
members of a specified group can all use and add to.  Multiple lists
could be created and you could subscribe to as many as you like and
that the members accept you.

This sounds eminently possible to me, if a fair bit of work.  Do
people with some technical knowledge have an idea if it is possible?

--
Sam