[Foundation-l] Cleaning vandalism on little-watched small wikis

[Robert Scott Horning]

Guillaume Paumier wrote:

>Hello,
>
>To help cleaning the small wikis, people from the Small wikis monitoring
>team have thought about asking people from all projects to create a redirect
>from [[Template:Delete]] to the local speedy deletion template. The major
>wikis have already set this redirect, but it would be very useful on small
>projects where sysops don't come very often. Thus they could check the
>linked pages/the related category and deal with the pages containing
>nonsense or pages remaining after move vandalism.
>
>Please help spreading this request on your projects and forward this message
>to people I've forgotten (I haven't found any mailing list for wikiquote,
>for example). Thanks a lot.
>  
>

I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach to take for 
something like this.  While I will admit that small wikis do tend to 
invite vandalism because there may not be an active administrator 
watching the content at all times, having a 'bot or an aggressive 
deletionist purging all content in a speedy delete category isn't 
necessarily the best thing either.  For myself as an administrator on a 
couple smallish Wikimedia wikis, I do a review of any candidates that 
get marked for speedy deletion and I don't always agree with the 
decision.  Sometimes I will bring it up for a community discussion 
instead (like a VfD or whatever) or try to fix the problems in the page. 
 That means that you have to have a working knowledge of the target 
language of that wiki, and perhaps even a strong feel for the goals and 
"traditions" of the Wiki community that is participating.

Certainly there is some obvious spam going on and blatant vandalism that 
is easily reverted or removed.  But on the very, very small wikis (like 
to.wikipedia, to give an example)  the only problem is that vandalism 
often goes unwatched for long periods of time, like weeks or even months 
before it is reverted and deleted.  Still, if there is any active 
"regular" Wikimedia user on that wiki who understands how to use the 
basic tools of being even a registered user, almost all of that 
vandalism can be easily cleaned up in a matter of just a few minutes.

I would also argue that while the content on those wikis might be 
vandalized for long periods of time, the number of people who actually 
see the vandalism is also correspondingly small as well, compared to the 
number of people who might see blatant vandalism on en.wikipedia.

The only exception to this is for those projects that have a large but 
novice user base.  This is either because there has been explosive 
growth of the project or some other aspect has made for a whole bunch of 
new users to sign up.  The presumption here is that these novice users 
are all busy creating content that sometimes goes amok.  Hopefully when 
this situation arises, there are some stewards who can offer a helping 
hand to that community.  This is also a problem that fixes itself over 
time, as these users get experience and can no longer be considered 
novice users.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning