I am working on a new anti-vandalism application for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. Before I get really deep into coding, I need to make sure that it will actually be used.
The basic problem that the application addresses is vandalism getting through Wikipedia's vandalism catching systems. The Wikipedia community does an excellent job overall, but every once in a while vandalism (subtle or obvious) gets through. I personally have come across a few pieces of vandalism that were months old.
The way the problem is addressed is to gather all edits together on a central server. Approved users would connect to the server and examine the edits for vandalism. If a certain number of users approve the edit it is removed from the pool. Edits marked as vandalism ("condemned") would be removed after the vandalism has been entirely dealt with: revert, warn, speedy delete, etc.
There are various tricks I can put on the central server to reduce the number of edits that need to be reviewed. The most obvious is a whitelist, but there are many other techniques such as combining edits made in close succession by a single editor to a single article.
Now to my questions. - Does this sound like a good idea in general? - Is there already a project similar to mine that I would be unnecessarily duplicating? - A significant number of users are needed to make the system work. Will the system probably be popular enough to get this minimum number of editors?
Cheers! Aaron DeVore