On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Petr Bena <benapetr(a)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.