On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Petr Bena benapetr@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, that's a nice feature. But if it's disabled I don't think it's useful then... Anyway this communication protocol would allow us to share way more info, we could share the list of potentially problematic edits and such, Clue Bot is skipping a lot of edits which may be a vandalism but it's not able to detect it correctly.
Well, I don't believe in a new "big all-in-one" system. We have many that we should build upon to avoid wasting a lot of efforts.
MediaWiki has a "patrol" flag on each recent change. That should simply be used. Otherwise double work occurs as other extensions or gadgets do use that. It also has a stable API that can be relied on, and any extensions written to utilize this MediaWiki feature will automatically work.
By not using that, double work occurs and time is being wasted.
Aside from MediaWiki in general, for the Wikimedia Foundation wikis there is an unofficial organization named "Countervandalism Network" (CVN), which pretty manages communication protocols and centralization in countervandalism efforts, I'd recommend staying in close touch with them[5] as well.
The CVN already has a "global" countervandalism database that contains much useful information that is being kept up to date with recent events[6]: * a global blacklist (list of usernames with an expiration date for the entry and a reason) * a global whitelist (basically a mirror listing all users that are 'patroller' or 'sysop' on one or wikis) * a global and a per-wiki watchlist (page names, expiration date and reason)
These are currently used by all CVNBots and SWBots in the #cvn-* channels on irc.freenode.net such as #cvn-commons and #cvn-wp-nl as well as #cvn-wp-en. In those channels edits by blacklisted users and/or on watched pages are highlighted. So it's a "common watchlist" for all CVN vandal-fighters. This database is replicated to the Toolserver and has a primitive API [3] (could be expanded) allowing gadgets to use this information as well. For example RTRC [1] and CVN_SimpleOverlay [2] use this API.
Some ideas I've been having for the long term:
* Switch to a machine-readable push notification service for recent changes (i.e. the best of the API (XML/JSON) and the best of IRC (push/subscribe). Something like WebSockets / PubSubHubBub / Jabber.
* Replace monitoring systems such as irc-vandalism bots, Huggle, STiki and the like with a Web-based framework (e.g. Extension:ActivityMonitor providing Special:ActivityMonitor) that allows following this stream live and ability to filter things out (e.g. patrolled edits) and highlight stuff (things that are on your watchlist, things on the CVN blacklist / watchlist) and other things we would expect from a monitor tool.
* Move the CVN database to WMF, making it available through the API.
* Enable cross-domain AJAX whitelist on WMF (CORS)
* Option in SpecialActivityMonitor to monitor multiple wikis (right now the CVN has an IRC channel #cvn-sw that monitors 600 small wikis that don't have a stable anti-vandalism team - monitored mostly by stewards and global sysops as well as global rollbackers, it is also the key to catching cross-wiki vandalism)
* In additional to monitoring a stream and hand-picking interesting edits, we should also implement a workflow like WikiHow's Special:RCPatrol [4] for wikis that are capable of patrolling all edits. Right now they do so through Special:RecentChanges by hiding unpatrolled edits and start at the back and work their way to the top, but that workflow sucks a lot and often causes double work as people click the same links.
I could go on like this but I better stop now. Hop in on #countervandalism for more.
Krinkle
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Krinkle/Tools/Real-Time_Recent_Changes
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Krinkle/Scripts/CVNSimpleOverlay
[3] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/CVN_API
[4] http://www.wikihow.com/Patrol-Recent-Changes-on-wikiHow
[5] "them", or "us", as I'm one of them - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CVN
[6] CVN has several bots. For example users that are blocked by admins on a wiki are automatically added to the global blacklist so that if a user is blocked on one wiki, edits by that account on other wikis will be highlighted (this is currently the only working defense that I know of against cross-wiki vandalism). CVN also has an irc-bridge with ClueNet, any user flagged in the ClueNet stream (which is populated by by ClueBot_NG) is also added to the CVN blacklist for the 2*duration that ClueBot monitors it.