On 2/27/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Part of the problem from my perspective is figuring out what to do in some of these tasks. I typically do this "janitorial" work in bursts---I'll do a bunch of recent-changes patrolling for three weeks, because I'm in the mood for it, or clear out copyright violations for a day, then I won't do anything for two months. When I come back to one of these tasks after an absence, it takes concerted effort to navigate the web of rules and templates and informal policies. Even simple stuff like, "so what's the current policy on warning/blocking vandals, and which of the 100+ user warning templates should I use?".
Test1-7. The rest are for people who enjoy categorising too much.
On the topic of bots but with a slightly different intent, some automation of drudgery would help make this work more appealing. Nobody likes to do work that is super-repetitive and requires no human judgment. Clearing out the batches of images tagged "orphan fair use" is annoying and I usually avoid doing it, because at least 50% of them are trivially mistagged due to not being orphaned (perhaps they were when tagged, but they aren't now), and so I end up spending most of my time just deleting the template and pasting in a "not orphaned" edit summary. A bot could do that for me, letting me as the human look only at the *actually* orphaned fair-use images to decide whether to delete them or not.
Already exists. Except that it also delete the orphans.