I get asked this by the press a lot. So I thought I'd come here and ask how it actually works.
1. What is the actual process? 2. How are new living bios spotted? 3. Who watches edits in them, on what sort of schedule?
And 4. the big one:
Is there anything that can be done to make the living bio patrolling volunteers' work easier and more efficient? What magical software features would you like? Is there anything that some as-yet-unwritten bot software could do to assist?
I'd love to be able to answer "we have a volunteer patrol who look out for any rubbish going in living biographies. We're not perfect but I think we do pretty well" and be able to give more detail if they ask ;-)
- d.
On 9/6/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I get asked this by the press a lot. So I thought I'd come here and ask how it actually works.
- What is the actual process?
- How are new living bios spotted?
- Who watches edits in them, on what sort of schedule?
The usual? People just happen to be watching an article on a yet-living person? Dunno man.
And 4. the big one:
Is there anything that can be done to make the living bio patrolling volunteers' work easier and more efficient? What magical software features would you like? Is there anything that some as-yet-unwritten bot software could do to assist?
....
Sort by category. As in, a Recent Changes page where only edits to articles in Living Persons or subcats there of are shown.
~maru
On 9/6/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
Sort by category. As in, a Recent Changes page where only edits to articles in Living Persons or subcats there of are shown.
As you wish: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&ta...
.... Which is exactly why living persons is not supposted to have subcats.
On 9/6/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/6/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
Sort by category. As in, a Recent Changes page where only edits to articles in Living Persons or subcats there of are shown.
As you wish: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&ta...
.... Which is exactly why living persons is not supposted to have subcats.
Neat! I had no idea you could do Related Changes for categories.
~maru
On 9/6/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
Neat! I had no idea you could do Related Changes for categories.
That feature is a non-insignificant part of why category:living persons actually exists.. It's documented on the category page, and I pointed it at least a dozen times while I was still bothering to argue with people who were opposed to it because it's not a good category for navigation.... :) If you could come up with a way to make people more aware of it, it would be greatly appreciated.
Now.. If I could only talk a javascript jockey into writing some user JS that overrides the watch this page button so that clicking opens a dropdown and lets you select one of several user defined pages... after selecting a page the script adds a link directed at the current page to the selected page.... Thus, with the help of related changes, facilitating public multi-user collaboratively edited watchlists.
On Sep 6, 2006, at 2:37 PM, David Gerard wrote:
- What is the actual process?
- How are new living bios spotted?
There is a the {{blp}} tag and the {{WPBiography|living=yes}} tag that is applied to the talk page. These automatically adds them to [[Category:Biography articles of living people]]
- Who watches edits in them, on what sort of schedule?
There is no such process in place. We have an initial proposal at [[Wikipedia:Libel-Protection_Unit]]
and a noticeboard at [[Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard]]
And 4. the big one:
Is there anything that can be done to make the living bio patrolling volunteers' work easier and more efficient? What magical software features would you like? Is there anything that some as-yet-unwritten bot software could do to assist?
I'd love to be able to answer "we have a volunteer patrol who look out for any rubbish going in living biographies. We're not perfect but I think we do pretty well" and be able to give more detail if they ask ;-)
One possibility would be to have a bot developer to write a RC bot that monitors all articles in the Category:Biography articles of living people. Similar to the RC bots that we have in place to combat vandalism.
Patrollers then will have a way to monitor edits made to articles on BLPs, and catch defaming statements that are un-sourced or poorly sourced.
-- Jossi
On 9/6/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote: [snip]
One possibility would be to have a bot developer to write a RC bot that monitors all articles in the Category:Biography articles of living people. Similar to the RC bots that we have in place to combat vandalism.
[snip]
Of course, the existing bots will also fix vandalism they detect on articles about living persons.... but I expect you mean bots that specifically target the sort of problems we're expecting to catch with living persons patrol.
The real challenge in that is identifying things which are clear evidence of vandalism (or at least a good red flag) for the bots to look for. An example might be any edit which introduces "is a fag" is highly suspect. You don't have to be a coder to create lists of such red flags... It would be useful if everyone who sees a lot of vandalism would make note of such patterns that we could expect a computer to detect and ideally provide diff links.
Once a good list is built they can be converted into [[regular expression]]s and tested against historical edits to determine their accuracy. Once we are confident that they are good things to watch for, adding them to a bot would take only minutes.
On Sep 6, 2006, at 5:22 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Of course, the existing bots will also fix vandalism they detect on articles about living persons.... but I expect you mean bots that specifically target the sort of problems we're expecting to catch with living persons patrol.
The real challenge in that is identifying things which are clear evidence of vandalism (or at least a good red flag) for the bots to look for. An example might be any edit which introduces "is a fag" is highly suspect. You don't have to be a coder to create lists of such red flags... It would be useful if everyone who sees a lot of vandalism would make note of such patterns that we could expect a computer to detect and ideally provide diff links.
Once a good list is built they can be converted into [[regular expression]]s and tested against historical edits to determine their accuracy. Once we are confident that they are good things to watch for, adding them to a bot would take only minutes.
I am asking for something simpler... A "recent changes" page that only shows articles on Category:Biographies of living people.
That could be an excellent first step and a very easy one for developers to implement. Once we have that we can ask one of the bot writers to apply the current regular expressions they have for fighting vandalism.
After that all we need is eyeballs, 10 to 20 editors & admins that want to monitor the bot RC.
Then we can tell the world that we have a BLP patrol in place, to fight abuse in this specific category of articles.
So, David: How do we get the developers to provide us with a recent changes page, for BLP?
-- Jossi
On 9/6/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
I am asking for something simpler... A "recent changes" page that only shows articles on Category:Biographies of living people.
Ah, thats a great idea.
[snip]
So, David: How do we get the developers to provide us with a recent changes page, for BLP?
You've twisted my arm enough, here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&ta...
enjoy.
On Sep 6, 2006, at 10:40 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
You've twisted my arm enough, here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category%3ALiving_people
Excellent. Thanks.
Now we need to ask Tawker or Essjay to modify their IRC bot (irc:// irc.freenode.net/vandalism-en-wp), to watch over this recent changes subset, and create a new channel in irc.freenode for the bot.
I will send them a message.
-- Jossi
On 07/09/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
Excellent. Thanks. Now we need to ask Tawker or Essjay to modify their IRC bot (irc:// irc.freenode.net/vandalism-en-wp), to watch over this recent changes subset, and create a new channel in irc.freenode for the bot.
Yep, this is what we need :-)
Note that when I say 'living bio patrol', I don't mean editors who want to purge all blogs or whatever. I mean just quickly checking for added rubbish or checking for someone putting a whack of material (negative *or* positive) in a living bio with no reference of any sort. Mistakes and bad edits will still happen - no-one is expected to be perfect, particularly not volunteers doing an important but tedious job - but it'll make them less likely.
- d.
On Sep 7, 2006, at 7:07 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 07/09/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
Excellent. Thanks. Now we need to ask Tawker or Essjay to modify their IRC bot (irc:// irc.freenode.net/vandalism-en-wp), to watch over this recent changes subset, and create a new channel in irc.freenode for the bot.
Yep, this is what we need :-)
I have asked them.
Note that when I say 'living bio patrol', I don't mean editors who want to purge all blogs or whatever. I mean just quickly checking for added rubbish or checking for someone putting a whack of material (negative *or* positive) in a living bio with no reference of any sort. Mistakes and bad edits will still happen - no-one is expected to be perfect, particularly not volunteers doing an important but tedious job - but it'll make them less likely.
Sure. That is the idea.
-- Jossi
On 07/09/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Sep 6, 2006, at 10:40 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
You've twisted my arm enough, here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category%3ALiving_people
Excellent. Thanks.
Now we need to ask Tawker or Essjay to modify their IRC bot (irc:// irc.freenode.net/vandalism-en-wp), to watch over this recent changes subset, and create a new channel in irc.freenode for the bot.
On a related note... is it possible to give a vandalism-bot its own watchlist? My understanding (which may be flawed) is that the bots cannot follow all recent changes due to volume; it would be very handy to be able to specify an article or articles where we could be sure these bots caught every change.
(Not a substitute for human watchlisting and cultivation of the article, of course, but a good way of alleviating headaches)
On Sep 7, 2006, at 10:50 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
On a related note... is it possible to give a vandalism-bot its own watchlist? My understanding (which may be flawed) is that the bots cannot follow all recent changes due to volume; it would be very handy to be able to specify an article or articles where we could be sure these bots caught every change.
Tawkerbot and the other bots used at www.countervandalism.org, have a watchlist feature that can be enabled.
-- Jossi
Well, I'm a developer of [[en:WP:MWT]] and I figure I could port MWT to fetch recent IP edits to living persons biographies. So, as long as vandals don't remove the category, it should work. I'll see if I can hack away at the code and build a prototype with the latest stable release.
-- Draicone | Akash
On 9/7/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Sep 6, 2006, at 5:22 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Of course, the existing bots will also fix vandalism they detect on articles about living persons.... but I expect you mean bots that specifically target the sort of problems we're expecting to catch with living persons patrol.
The real challenge in that is identifying things which are clear evidence of vandalism (or at least a good red flag) for the bots to look for. An example might be any edit which introduces "is a fag" is highly suspect. You don't have to be a coder to create lists of such red flags... It would be useful if everyone who sees a lot of vandalism would make note of such patterns that we could expect a computer to detect and ideally provide diff links.
Once a good list is built they can be converted into [[regular expression]]s and tested against historical edits to determine their accuracy. Once we are confident that they are good things to watch for, adding them to a bot would take only minutes.
I am asking for something simpler... A "recent changes" page that only shows articles on Category:Biographies of living people.
That could be an excellent first step and a very easy one for developers to implement. Once we have that we can ask one of the bot writers to apply the current regular expressions they have for fighting vandalism.
After that all we need is eyeballs, 10 to 20 editors & admins that want to monitor the bot RC.
Then we can tell the world that we have a BLP patrol in place, to fight abuse in this specific category of articles.
So, David: How do we get the developers to provide us with a recent changes page, for BLP?
-- Jossi _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Sep 6, 2006, at 11:16 PM, Akash Mehta wrote:
I'll see if I can hack away at the code and build a prototype with the latest stable release.
That will be great. And it would be greater yet, if it could be ported to Java so that your app could run on a Mac, Linux or other non-Windows OSes... :)
-- Jossi
Well, I know TehKewl / Simon managed to get it running on Linux, but the code is VB6 for absolute simplicity and functionality. And since I'm not familiar with Java, this may be a problem :)
On 9/7/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Sep 6, 2006, at 11:16 PM, Akash Mehta wrote:
I'll see if I can hack away at the code and build a prototype with the latest stable release.
That will be great. And it would be greater yet, if it could be ported to Java so that your app could run on a Mac, Linux or other non-Windows OSes... :)
-- Jossi _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 07/09/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Sep 6, 2006, at 2:37 PM, David Gerard wrote:
- How are new living bios spotted?
There is a the {{blp}} tag and the {{WPBiography|living=yes}} tag that is applied to the talk page. These automatically adds them to [[Category:Biography articles of living people]]
OK ... that would need someone watching [[Special:Newarticles]] for anything that looks like a bio. They'd ideally want a nice little bit of javascript to hand that adds those tags, if not already present.
The recent changes feed on the category is a useful tool. Except of course it runs at about 5-10 edits a minute. Fun for all ...
- d.
- d.
If we could develop a system, like VP2, that took the feed and allocated edits seperately to different users...
On 9/7/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/09/06, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Sep 6, 2006, at 2:37 PM, David Gerard wrote:
- How are new living bios spotted?
There is a the {{blp}} tag and the {{WPBiography|living=yes}} tag that is applied to the talk page. These automatically adds them to [[Category:Biography articles of living people]]
OK ... that would need someone watching [[Special:Newarticles]] for anything that looks like a bio. They'd ideally want a nice little bit of javascript to hand that adds those tags, if not already present.
The recent changes feed on the category is a useful tool. Except of course it runs at about 5-10 edits a minute. Fun for all ...
d.
d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 07/09/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/7/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The recent changes feed on the category is a useful tool. Except of course it runs at about 5-10 edits a minute. Fun for all ...
If we could develop a system, like VP2, that took the feed and allocated edits seperately to different users...
For the RC queue? Nah, that's overengineering. If it turned out edits weren't being covered, we could just work out a very rough roster of 10-minute chunks, say.
- d.