[WikiEN-l] How does living bio patrol actually work?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/6/06, Jossi Fresco <jossifresco at mac.com> wrote:
[snip]
> One possibility would be to have a bot developer to write a RC bot
> that monitors all articles in the Category:Biography articles of
> living people. Similar to the RC bots that we have in place to combat
> vandalism.
[snip]

Of course, the existing bots will also fix vandalism they detect on
articles about living persons....  but I expect you mean bots that
specifically target the sort of problems we're expecting to catch with
living persons patrol.

The real challenge in that is identifying things which are clear
evidence of vandalism (or at least a good red flag) for the bots to
look for. An example might be any edit which introduces "is a fag" is
highly suspect. You don't have to be a coder to create lists of such
red flags... It would be useful if everyone who sees a lot of
vandalism would make note of such patterns that we could expect a
computer to detect and ideally provide diff links.

Once a good list is built they can be converted into [[regular
expression]]s and tested against historical edits to determine their
accuracy.   Once we are confident that they are good things to watch
for, adding them to a bot would take only minutes.