On Apr 29, 2008, at 10:55 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I am trying to raise awareness of a real problem and help to generate and sustain a productive conversation about how we might best deal with it.
OK. So let's approach this as a practical problem then.
First of all, let's note that vandalism is inevitable, and that no anti-vandalism procedure will respond with instant efficiency in all cases. So, given that, what sort of anti-vandalism procedure is ideal?
To my mind, one of the major problems with our current anti-vandalism practices is that there is an excessive focus on a measure of personal glory. Vandalism clean-up should be considered an organic process of the wiki in which waste matter is expelled. Vandal fighting should not be a role or a job - it should be a natural process intrinsic to the system. Ideally a counter-vandalism unit or an explicit vandal- fighting procedure should be unnecessary.
So what anti-vandalism tools do we have?
Our first line of defense is, obviously, editors working as normal. If any even semi-regular editor finds vandalism, they fix it. This keeps a surprising number of articles clean. But we work on the long tail, and this mechanism is not always fast and misses things.
Our next line of defense is automated tools. We have a limited capability vandalism reversion bot. We need a more vigorous one. This will require writing subtle filters - we can't revert every edit that adds the word "penis" even if 99% of those edits are vandalism. But on the other hand, spam-filtering technology could probably be adapted here successfully. This is a technical solution and requires coders to take on the project. Where can we get volunteers? Is there existing code (perhaps spam-filtering code) that could be adapted? These are important questions, but they need to be taken to the bot community to get useful answers.
Finally there's stable versions. This is a nearly year-old piece of code that remains "coming soon." Does the code work? Can it be implemented on en in a technical fashion? If we wanted to, could this be turned on tomorrow, basically? If not, what needs to happen to make it so it could be, and who is doing that? Where is the road map for this?
If it's ready, it's time to make an implementation decision for En. The assumption is that this will be "left up to each Wiki community." Is that actually wise? The en community is awfully large, as I've said, to make a programmatic decision. In the end, I think flagged revisions need to be implemented by you and by decree after consulting with the community. Otherwise *they will never go into place*.
There's three areas of actual specific issues to deal with.
A second approach to consider - are there any aspects of our vandalism fighting that just don't work at present? What, if anything, are we doing wrong (as opposed to not well enough yet)?
There. That's a discussion about things we can do.
-Phil