[Wikipedia-l] Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted hand" status

[Daniel Mayer]

I'm sure many of you have noticed that recently there has been a growing 
problem of people creating user accounts for the sole purpose of using 
wikipedia's upload utility to place copyrighted and otherwise inappropriate 
material on the server. 

We might want to discuss further limiting just who can use this utility 
because this is beginning to be a maintenance issue for the syops and the 
presence of these bogus user accounts is also over-reporting the number of 
true (as in contributing) users we have . 

I know the "trusted hand" status is in the database already so it might be 
easy to limit this ability to "trusted hand" or greater status users. It 
would also be nice to have this status granted automatically if say two 
conditions are met: 1) a user account is at least one month old and 2) this 
user has edited a certain number of articles (I would be liberal and set this 
at 30, but I wouldn't mind having it set at up to 100). 

And while we are at it we might also want to grant trusted hands the ability 
to do things that currently only sysops can do -- like edit certain protected 
pages (those set to "is_trusted" perhaps? "is_sysop" would then only be used 
to protect established policy pages and for emergencies -- if a "trusted 
hand" went on a rampage it would be simple to just change the user's status). 
I wonder if a script could be written to change the status of all current 
users that have edited a certain number of articles? The sysops could always 
do this by hand if need be. 

Oh, and if something like this were established we should encourage sysops to 
manually promote outstanding new users to "trusted hand" status early (there 
are several outstanding examples of new users already: they started off 
running and "got it" very early). 

Just a thought....

maveric149