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Developing a Vandalism Detector For Wikipedia
marpot writes "In an effort to assist Wikipedia's editors in their struggle to keep articles clean, we are conducting a public lab on vandalism detection. The goal is the development of a practical vandalism detector that is capable of telling apart ill-intentioned edits from well-intentioned edits. Such a tool, which will work somewhat like a spam detector, will release the crowd's workforce currently occupied with manual and semi-automatic edit filtering. The performance of submitted detectors will be evaluated based on a large collection of human-annotated edits, which has been crowdsourced using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Everyone is welcome to participate."
Further Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot
Summation 2
We have studied the accuracy of ClueBot, and found that (on a small corpus) it has very good precision (low falsy positive rate), but a very low recall (low true positive rate). (see: http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/publications/downloads/papers/stein_2008c.pdf) But the picture might look quite different on a large scale.
A system like this has been implemented for the German Wikipedia. Almost everybody who has an account can verify articles to be vandalism-free, unless you are logged in you see the last verified version by default.
(+1, Disagree)
How about a log of each admin's activities, including reversions, bans, etc, and a way for non-admins to challenge actions (without spending countless hours in an appeal process worthy of a federal court).
Reversions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions
Bans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/block
Deletes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/delete
Anything else you're too lazy to find yourself?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If I had mod points, I'd mod the parent up and the grandparent down. Seriously, almost everything in Wikipedia is transparent. Search the revision history and logs and look for the information you need. RTFM.
A lot of people on /. seem to derive very general opinions about admins from a personal disappointing encounter. They do not include diffs of their edits or their username. From my experience in most cases the guy who got reverted by an admin broke some kind of rule (and often enough they just got reverted by a regular non-admin, but they assume it was an admin). Instead of RTFM those people post as AC complaining generally about admins without providing any traceable cases of admin abuse. I know my opinion isn't very popular, but unless you give concrete examples your allegations are just FUD.