There was an interesting posting to wikitech earlier about Abuse Filter. Any thoughts on getting the extension on Wikia?
Rather than just serious filtering of bad behavior it looks like there are interesting soft filters that can spit out a message to the user and ask for confirmation. The fact that such a message set for page blanking turned 56 of 78 page blanking actions into constructive wiki edits is very intriguing. I can definitely see a good use for that kind of feature, especially fitting in with Wikia's ideas for getting new contributors to a wiki. I can think of a good number of filters I could put on the Narutopedia which would give a friendly message telling a newbie "You're trying to do this? It's not normally considered polite here, maybe you wanted to do this instead?" to help point out things which normally would end up with someone from the community reverting, tagging for deletion, or whatnot. Bleh, to bad it can't catch C&P page moves or copyvios from LeafNinja.com. -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) -------- Original Message -------- 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 -- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://nadir-seen-fire.com] -Nadir-Point & Wiki-Tools (http://nadir-point.com) (http://wiki-tools.com) -MonkeyScript (http://monkeyscript.org) -Animepedia (http://anime.wikia.com) -Narutopedia (http://naruto.wikia.com) -Soul Eater Wiki (http://souleater.wikia.com) _______________________________________________ Wikia Community Mailing List. For information and subscriptions see http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l Need staff help? Try http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Contact
