Hi everybody.
First of all, for those of you
who haven't been here, or didn't get the complete picture, here is a
short summary of some recent events:
The Problem
Vandalism on Commons is a big problem,
which generates a large backlog. Commons is the primary media
depository for most media used throughout Wikimedia. Vandalism on
Commons therefore has a greater likelihood of affecting local projects.
And, this also brings along the source of
vandalism: Vandals.
Local vandals are only a click away from
Commons. Some don't even realise they are no longer on the local wiki.
Some, whether or not knowing they've been
blocked on a local project, continue vandalising on Commons.
So, having that said, we are looking for
help !
The most important areas, for
now, are live watches on IRC or recent
changes, and the Checklists mentioned above.
Live watch
Although there are about a dozen idling
users and a bot at any one time, use of the channel for vandal-fighting
is not as frequent as desired.
Watching live is probably the easiest and
most effective way to fight vandalism.
Also, for those who don't have the time
to patrol an entire daypart-checklist, this is a great way to
contribute when they only have a spare few minutes. One can leave and
join at any time, and click/patrol for all edits that are reported in
the channel.
In comparison to the checklists, the
CVN-channel has a couple of advantages. JelteBot (the recent-changes
bot in #cvn-commons) emphasises edits based on blacklists and
watchlists, making it easier to detect potential vandalism. (If you
monitor other channels too, you could add /Warning!/ to your
IRC-stalklist.)
So I recommend the "patroller" right for
anybody who wishes to participate, which you can ask for here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_rights. Please
feel free to join #cvn-commons, or Commons' main channel
#wikimedia-commons, for more information about other ways to get
involved.
Every user in the counter-vandalism
channel, watching and reacting to the stream, reduces the backlog even
more.
Watching live means the user can be
reverted and warned directly; s/he will either get blocked if they
continue disruption, or (not unlikely) the vandal will stop when s/he
reads the warning.
Doing this live, instead of afterwards,
prevents more vandalism, and thus generate less edits in the backlog.
Checklists
Since it's unlikely (though the
impossible goal of Live watch) to click and patrol each and every link
in the IRC channel, lots of links are missed.
Either because no-one was on watch, or
it got lost in the fast stream of links.
For that, we have the checklists.
These contain all unpatrolled anonymous edits from a certain time frame.
These are, until we have a much bigger
team, the primary and most time-consuming ways of fighting vandalism.
Also, when you can't access IRC, or
don't like it for some reason, the RecentChanges-page is a good
alternative:
If you don't know how this works, check
the following links to get you up to speed:
Then visit the CVU and check out a
portion/day-part:
Thank you for reading,
Yours,
Krinkle