Bart wrote:
I think a better solution would be to upgrade Huggle/Twinkle. As it now stands, the main antivandal programs are... somewhat stodgy. When you have a bunch of people all using them at once, you start to run into edit conflicts. Different people will be trying to revert the same page at the same time. But you know how you can set a page as "patrolled" in the "new revisions" section? Perhaps there should be a way to set that on Huggle/Twinkle, but for multiple users. There could be a flag that flips when there are more than X number of users actively running through Huggle/Twinkle. If the number of users is greater than X, then revisions are actually sent out to multiple people at once. This seems somewhat contradictory at first, the idea that you'll save time/resources and cover more pages if you have more people working on the same page, but it wouldn't revert as soon as you hit revert. It would just set the flag on that page and serve up the next page -- if a majority of reviewers reverts it, the vandalism is reverted and the vandal is warned.
If the number of users is lower than X, then of course each person would instantly revert a page when they revert. But I spend a lot of time waiting for Huggle to revert a page and warn a user. This may not be the case for everyone, but I read very quickly. I read the last Harry Potter book in like a couple of hours, no joking. When I use Huggle, I spend the majority of my time waiting for Huggle to revert a page and warn a user (well, other than using Google to find other sites to check on factual accuracy, but that's another story).
I just feel that the amount of edit conflicts while using Huggle and the amount that the same set of pages is looked over by the same set of people, all of whom are trying to individually revert, is just too much. There's far too much wasted time, in my opinion, because Huggle and Twinkle, although great, are just slightly inadequate to keep up with how big Wikepdia has become. It's so huge that it's impossible for one person to read it all, since it'd take a few years of continuous reading and it's growing faster than the fastest reader could read.
In summary, your complain is that Huggle and Twinkle are slow. Complain to its authors, not to mediawiki developers. It's up to you to use them or not, or even create a "better" tool.
If two people save the same version, mediawiki already chooses the first one. There could be an addition of "add this section if it doesn't exist" command, but that's all.
Antivandal tools are free to synchronize and load their load between them in any way they wish. This is the wrong list to rant about them.