[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Abuse Filter extension activated on English Wikipedia

[Peter Coombe]

2009/3/18 Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml at gmail.com>:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Andrew Garrett <agarrett at wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:34 AM
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Abuse Filter extension activated on English Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> I am pleased to announce that the Abuse Filter [1] has been activated
> on English Wikipedia!
>
> The Abuse Filter is an extension to the MediaWiki [2] software that
> powers Wikipedia allowing automatic "filters" or "rules" to be run
> against every edit, and to take actions if any of those rules are
> triggered. It is designed to combat vandalism which is simple and
> pattern-based, from blanking pages to complicated evasive page-move
> vandalism.
>
> We've already seen some pretty cool uses for the Abuse Filter. While
> there are filters for the obvious personal attacks [3], many of our
> filters are there just to identify common newbie mistakes such
> page-blanking [4], give the users a friendly warning [5] and ask them
> if they really want to submit their edits.
>
> The best part is that these friendly "soft" warning messages seem to
> work in passively changing user behaviour. Just the suggestion that we
> frown on page-blanking was enough to stop 56 of the 78 matches [6] of
> that filter when I checked. If you look closely, you'll even find that
> many of the users took our advice and redirected the page or did
> something else more constructive instead.
>
> I'm very pleased at my work being used so well on English Wikipedia,
> and I'm looking forward to seeing some quality filters in the near
> future! While at the moment, some of the harsher actions such as
> blocking are disabled on Wikimedia, we're hoping that the filters
> developed will be good enough that we can think about activating them
> in the future.
>
> If anybody has any questions or concerns about the Abuse Filter, feel
> free to file a bug [7], contact me on IRC (werdna on
> irc.freenode.net), post on my user talk page, or send me an email at
> agarrett at wikimedia.org
>
> [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter
> [2] http://www.mediawiki.org
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/9
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseFilter/3
> [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-blanking
> [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&wpSearchFilter=3
> [7] http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org
>
> --
> Andrew Garrett
>
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>
> --
> Casey Brown
> Cbrown1023
>

Yay! I know I've been waiting for this for a long time and in fact was
just thinking about it today. I had no idea it was so close to being
enabled. Thanks to everyone involved.

Pete / the wub