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