[WikiEN-l] JuryBot (was: Scott McCloud on Wikipedia)

[Delirium]

Michael Noda wrote:
> On 2/27/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> FWIW, I think that decreasing the average workload of the "hyperactives"
>> should be a major priority. The quality of their work will improve, the
>> number of fatigue-related problems will decrease, and there may be less
>> hesitation in de-sysopping one of them.
>>     
>
> I wholeheartedly agree.  One thing that jumps out from the list of
> deleters that geni posted
> (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/deleterlist> if you
> missed it) is that about a third of the 840 admins listed have not
> made a single deletion in the last 500,000.  Hardly an example of
> leveraging of the long tail!
>   

Part of the problem from my perspective is figuring out what to do in 
some of these tasks.  I typically do this "janitorial" work in 
bursts---I'll do a bunch of recent-changes patrolling for three weeks, 
because I'm in the mood for it, or clear out copyright violations for a 
day, then I won't do anything for two months.  When I come back to one 
of these tasks after an absence, it takes concerted effort to navigate 
the web of rules and templates and informal policies.  Even simple stuff 
like, "so what's the current policy on warning/blocking vandals, and 
which of the 100+ user warning templates should I use?".  It tends to 
lead to me doing a small subset of things I feel confident in my 
familiarity with (new-article and recent-changes patrolling, mainly, and 
some prod-clearing), and avoiding anything else.  To be fair, some parts 
of our "process" do have concise documentation on the relevant page with 
nicely laid out bold text saying something like "If you're just 
wondering how to do [x], do these steps: 1, 2, 3, 4", and in those cases 
it's easier to get into them.

On the topic of bots but with a slightly different intent, some 
automation of drudgery would help make this work more appealing. Nobody 
likes to do work that is super-repetitive and requires no human 
judgment.  Clearing out the batches of images tagged "orphan fair use" 
is annoying and I usually avoid doing it, because at least 50% of them 
are trivially mistagged due to not being orphaned (perhaps they were 
when tagged, but they aren't now), and so I end up spending most of my 
time just deleting the template and pasting in a "not orphaned" edit 
summary.  A bot could do that for me, letting me as the human look only 
at the *actually* orphaned fair-use images to decide whether to delete 
them or not.  There are a bunch of other examples.  Incidentally, two 
nice examples of automation are the bots clearing WP:AIV, and the bot 
that goes around adding Template:SharedIPEDU to talk pages of IPs from 
universities and school districts.

-Mark