Mailing List Archive

Guillaume Paumier wrote:

>Hello,
>
>To help cleaning the small wikis, people from the Small wikis monitoring
>team have thought about asking people from all projects to create a redirect
>from [[Template:Delete]] to the local speedy deletion template. The major
>wikis have already set this redirect, but it would be very useful on small
>projects where sysops don't come very often. Thus they could check the
>linked pages/the related category and deal with the pages containing
>nonsense or pages remaining after move vandalism.
>
>Please help spreading this request on your projects and forward this message
>to people I've forgotten (I haven't found any mailing list for wikiquote,
>for example). Thanks a lot.
>
>

I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach to take for
something like this. While I will admit that small wikis do tend to
invite vandalism because there may not be an active administrator
watching the content at all times, having a 'bot or an aggressive
deletionist purging all content in a speedy delete category isn't
necessarily the best thing either. For myself as an administrator on a
couple smallish Wikimedia wikis, I do a review of any candidates that
get marked for speedy deletion and I don't always agree with the
decision. Sometimes I will bring it up for a community discussion
instead (like a VfD or whatever) or try to fix the problems in the page.
That means that you have to have a working knowledge of the target
language of that wiki, and perhaps even a strong feel for the goals and
"traditions" of the Wiki community that is participating.

Certainly there is some obvious spam going on and blatant vandalism that
is easily reverted or removed. But on the very, very small wikis (like
to.wikipedia, to give an example) the only problem is that vandalism
often goes unwatched for long periods of time, like weeks or even months
before it is reverted and deleted. Still, if there is any active
"regular" Wikimedia user on that wiki who understands how to use the
basic tools of being even a registered user, almost all of that
vandalism can be easily cleaned up in a matter of just a few minutes.

I would also argue that while the content on those wikis might be
vandalized for long periods of time, the number of people who actually
see the vandalism is also correspondingly small as well, compared to the
number of people who might see blatant vandalism on en.wikipedia.

The only exception to this is for those projects that have a large but
novice user base. This is either because there has been explosive
growth of the project or some other aspect has made for a whole bunch of
new users to sign up. The presumption here is that these novice users
are all busy creating content that sometimes goes amok. Hopefully when
this situation arises, there are some stewards who can offer a helping
hand to that community. This is also a problem that fixes itself over
time, as these users get experience and can no longer be considered
novice users.

--
Robert Scott Horning



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On 11/27/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning@netzero.net> wrote:
>
> Guillaume Paumier wrote:
>
> >Hello,
> >
> >To help cleaning the small wikis, people from the Small wikis monitoring
> >team have thought about asking people from all projects to create a
> redirect
> >from [[Template:Delete]] to the local speedy deletion template. The major
> >wikis have already set this redirect, but it would be very useful on
> small
> >projects where sysops don't come very often. Thus they could check the
> >linked pages/the related category and deal with the pages containing
> >nonsense or pages remaining after move vandalism.
> >
> >Please help spreading this request on your projects and forward this
> message
> >to people I've forgotten (I haven't found any mailing list for wikiquote,
> >for example). Thanks a lot.
> >
> >
>
> I'm not entirely sure that this is the best approach to take for
> something like this. While I will admit that small wikis do tend to
> invite vandalism because there may not be an active administrator
> watching the content at all times, having a 'bot or an aggressive
> deletionist purging all content in a speedy delete category isn't
> necessarily the best thing either. For myself as an administrator on a
> couple smallish Wikimedia wikis, I do a review of any candidates that
> get marked for speedy deletion and I don't always agree with the
> decision. Sometimes I will bring it up for a community discussion
> instead (like a VfD or whatever) or try to fix the problems in the page.
> That means that you have to have a working knowledge of the target
> language of that wiki, and perhaps even a strong feel for the goals and
> "traditions" of the Wiki community that is participating.
> [snip]
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l




The pages aren't going to be deleted by bots. The people of the small wiki
monitoring team (see [[m:SWMT]]), if they see spam or blatant vandalism
flagged by the IRC bots, would tag it with {{delete}}, then an admin of that
project would go through the speedy deletion category and delete it. The
benefit of having a redirect from [[Template:Delete]] is that the people
monitoring the wiki for spam don't have to actually know the language to tag
something (though they could go to [[m:Multilingual speedy deletions]].
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