[WikiEN-l] Flagged Revisions on nl:wp

[David Gerard]

Lodewijk explained in a discussion on a private list how the 'revision
patrolled' mechanism worked well on nl:wp. I remember that it rapidly
fell into disuse on en:wp, so asked how it worked in practice.
(Message forwarded here with permission - "consider it gfdl :-)".)

I think the idea of an RC patrol roster would be useful - not to find
people to cover the time, as much as to discourage people from doing
it to the point of burnout (and the consequent presumption of bad
faith and newbie-biting).

Thoughts? (And what are the most useful venues on en:wp to put a link
to or copy of this message on?)


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com>

> > I think that this is not entirely true. MarkAsPatrolled is being used
> > extensively in the Dutch language Wikipedia (already for years now i think),
> > with good results. You just might have to work out the right procedures to
> > make it work. I am not entirely sure on which wiki you are basing your
> > conclusions, but you might want to consider to check out nlwiki :)

>[someone else's response deleted - d.]

on nlwiki we have a control center for vandal fighting. You may find
it on http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CV . Every day is chopped in
several pieces, and people can sign up for a part to check it
(afterwards). That way every single anonymous edit is manually
checked. If the edit is checked, it will be marked as patrolled. A
symilar list is set up for new articles, but this is not with
mark-as-patrolled, but with only a checklist for day-parts.

Everybody with a confirmed account can mark as patrolled. Every m.a.p.
is logged. So if someone falsely marks an edit as patrolled, he or she
can be blocked for that. It is not official policy, but generally
considered as inside-vandalism, so worse then normal vandalism.

I think the main trick is that the majority of the vandal fighters has
to support the system. Furthermore, there has to be a certain social
control. The most obvious problems have already been fixed (anonymous
and new accounts can't mark. Marks are logged, so abuse can be tracked
and stopped.

The largest advantage of map is that you can share the workload, that
you can check the vandalism afterwards. Especially for wiki's with no
24/7 patrols this might be very usefull, or wiki's with a *lot* of
edits, where live patrol becomes impossible. There is a clearly
defined backlog, and 99% of the vandalism is found this way.

BR, Lodewijk