Brian wrote:
This extension is very important for training machine learning vandalism detection bots. Recently published systems use only hundreds of examples of vandalism in training - not nearly enough to distinguish between the variety found in Wikipedia or generalize to new, unseen forms of vandalism. A large set of human created rules could be run against all previous edits in order to create a massive vandalism dataset.
As a machine-learning person, this seems like a somewhat problematic idea--- generating training examples *from a rule set* and then learning on them is just a very roundabout way of reconstructing that rule set. What you really want is a large dataset of human-labeled examples of vandalism / non-vandalism that *can't* currently be distinguished reliably by rules, so you can throw a machine-learning algorithm at the problem of trying to come up with some.
-Mark