Anthere wrote in part:
Having far less participants, non-english wikipedias do not "work" 'round the clock. There are periods of time when nobody is watching, and nobody can react to an attack. To speak of the case I know, there is very often noone between 2am and 5am, and sometimes noone between 9am to 12am on the fr:wiki. Or when somebody is around, it's often a newcomer. If any vandalism was to occur from an anonymous ip, we are only 3 sysops to be able to ban it anyway.
I support system that could automatically detect a potential problem. It is very likely that
- one user/ip saving every minute for more than 10 mn
is a potential problem
- any edit replacing more than xxxx characters by x
characters (except redirect...) is a potential problem
- any edit replacing more than xxxx characters by an
image that was downloaded less than tt minutes before is a potential problem
But, then, what good would it do, if an automatic system detect a potential problem but has no human to warn ?
OK, here's an idea: We should develop (on [[m:]]) a Bayesian vandal detector. We'll implement this detector (or versions of it) on every wiki, and set up a mailing list of militia members to be warned when the detector suspects vandalism. The catch is, the mailing list is international. So if there's vandalism on [[fr:]], then I can learn about it and respond to it during the time that I'm online, even if none of the French speakers are online then. (Of course, I need to know a little French to do this, so I can list the languages that I know a little of when I sign up for the mailing list, lest I get warnings about vandalism on [[zh:]] that I can't safely do anything about.)
-- Toby