On 8/6/07, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
It's time for us to think about how we want to use this technology. There are lots of possibilities beyond the precise design that de Alfaro proposes. Brainstorm away.
Well, the obvious application would be to mark edits by users whose edits tend to be removed quickly on RecentChanges and similar pages. Page history as well. IP edits could be grouped together by some block metric, maybe (call it AOL flag!:-)
A new special page generating lists of pages with "suspicious" edits. Might be useful to find long-hidden vandalism. Or not, if the metric gets better with time...
I also have some questions: What happens if a page is blanked by someone and then restored by me? Am I awarded all the "points" for all future versions of that page? Is the metric then "cleared", meaning, reset to my metric? What about partial text removal/restoration? What if I move some text around within the page?
Also, heavily changed text is not neccessarily bad. For example, wat if I hadd realy badd tyops, but would write good (information-rich, NPOV, referenced) content? People will fix my typos and grammar, and I'll get a "bad" metric, right? (One can probably filter for the occasional typo not to influence the metric, though).
The same thing, other way around: A vandal changing dates ever so slightly, will he show up? Or will a minor-typo-filter hide him behind a threshold?
About the concern that was raised in another reply to your mail: One can probably figure out who wrote a highly flagged passage of a page by going through the history of that page. But, even if someone does that, what's the point? The metric will change over time, right? So, a newbie might be flagged like this in the beginning, when (s)he is not member of the cabal yet, but that will change once (s)he becomes a productive member of the happy wikipedia family, correct? Besides, I doubt that such retro-engineered metrics would ever be a socially accepted argument on the project. I don't see a real problem here.
Magnus