I am working on a new anti-vandalism application for Wikipedia and the other
Wikimedia projects. Before I get really deep into coding, I need to make sure
that it will actually be used.
The basic problem that the application addresses is vandalism getting through
Wikipedia's vandalism catching systems. The Wikipedia community does an
excellent job overall, but every once in a while vandalism (subtle or
obvious) gets through. I personally have come across a few pieces of
vandalism that were months old.
The way the problem is addressed is to gather all edits together on a central
server. Approved users would connect to the server and examine the edits for
vandalism. If a certain number of users approve the edit it is removed from
the pool. Edits marked as vandalism ("condemned") would be removed after the
vandalism has been entirely dealt with: revert, warn, speedy delete, etc.
There are various tricks I can put on the central server to reduce the number
of edits that need to be reviewed. The most obvious is a whitelist, but there
are many other techniques such as combining edits made in close succession by
a single editor to a single article.
Now to my questions.
- Does this sound like a good idea in general?
- Is there already a project similar to mine that I would be unnecessarily
duplicating?
- A significant number of users are needed to make the system work. Will the
system probably be popular enough to get this minimum number of editors?
Cheers!
Aaron DeVore