Yes, I think I recall this now that you mention. It's not quite what I had in mind, and I seem to recall someone had used it to create some sort of magical RC monitoring program?
The streaming of such information would seem to be the first step to figuring out innovative ways to use it. I made a suggestion to BugZilla that the deletion log also be set up with an RSS feed -- you could use it to keep track of which articles streamed out of Newpages you didn't have to deal with -- though I have no pretension that such a thing should be an urgent priority since there is no infrastructure to take advantage of it at the moment.
FF
On 12/5/05, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/5/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On a similar topic -- are there any tool for automatic monitoring new page creation?
I was thinking about this in the shower today, and it didn't seem that it would be very technically difficult (for a guy who knows some VB and PHP) to hook up an (external) program which would monitor the Special:Newpages RSS feed, then check the page content itself and potentially flag it as something to attend to if it met a set of variable characteristics -- i.e., is it less than 5 words long, does it contain the word "fart" or "gay" or "penis", was it created by an anon, is it wikified, and so forth. More complicated though still quite feasible operations could involve automatically putting a sample of the content through Google and seeing if anything comes up, or potentially checking for incoming links, etc. At the end of the day you could ideally run something which would check all of those marked as "potential problems" to see if they had been edited extensively or deleted, and then make it easy for the editor running the program to take a look at what remained. All in all it wouldn't put any more stress on the servers than a user who actually checked these things manually, and would potentially catch things that were missed by other diligant admins.
Anything like this exist? If not, I might try to cobble one together in my (meager) spare time, though I warn you it'll be written in Visual Basic... Seems like it would help with at least one problem in relation to new pages, if not the more insidious one of false claims disguised as encyclopedia articles.
FF
Gmaxwell has a bot written in Python that usually runs in #wikipedia-en-suspectedits which reads every diff as it comes through. A diff gets announced if it contains various words considered offensive (profanity, ethnic slurs), words considered offensive if not used in context ("gay" in an article where the previous revision contained neither "homosexual" nor "gay" nor other similarly related words), added exclamation points (usually at the least poor encyclopedic style!), and speedy delete notices; he's taken a few other suggestions for improvement.
Unfortunately it's not running at the moment as toolserver is still down, but it's a pretty useful tool to aid RC patrol.
(Yes, Gmaxwell is my significant other, but that's not why I'm plugging the bot, honest. :-))
-Kat [[User:Mindspillage]]
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