On 7/16/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
(At the risk of [[WP:BEANS]], I'd like to note that there is another related problem; if a vandal blanks the section of an article containing the interlanguage links, a bot will often quickly show up to restore them, as a side effect hiding the vandalism itself from the watchlist. Making the bots smarter would help, but I'm not sure what can be done to solve this problem in general, beyond hiding bot edits from the watchlist by default and making the feature actually do what it should do -- i.e. show the last non-bot edit instead.)
Any anonymous user reducing the byte size of an article by more than 100 bytes should automatically set alarm bells off. The software should detect this (and similar patterns of probable abuse) and add them to a to-do list of dubious changes to be checked.
I'm vary wary of assigning important tasks like this to bots, as you never know when a bot will check any page, or when it will be down, or running on out of date data or whatever. Performing a couple of quick heuristic checks at the time the edit is made would be the best...
Steve
Steve