Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Automatic vandalism/spam detection and revert in more wikis/Proposal

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  • Problem: Vandalism and spam/promotion is a serious problem in Wikipedia. Fighting it is tedious and boring and sometimes makes the user target of harassment. This is already damaging image of Wikipedia (e.g. Germany's John Oliver did a full story about how spam and promotion is happening and going unnoticed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNsTaKwyAzI). As pointed out in the story, number of articles to patrol has been doubled in the past decade while number of volunteers shrank to half. WMF hasn't done anything to improve workflow of patrollers in the past five years (the last I remember is RCFilters, then PageTriage but that was only on English Wikipedia). Some Wikis have tried drastic measures such as banning all IP editing that goes against Wiki's guiding principles and harms the wiki in the long-term.
  • Proposed solution: Expand ClueBot NG to more wikis or build a similar one.
  • Who would benefit: Editors will be less burdened with the firehose of vandalism and spam and promotion. Readers will enjoy a higher quality Wikipedia.
  • More comments: Note that ORES is not designed to be used for automatic reverts. It's good at reducing the pool to review (a little, not much because ORES relies heavily on user being logged in or not) but still it's not accurate enough for automatic reverts (I have tried it several times in two different wikis). I also don't mind any other proposal that improves lives of patrollers.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Amir (talk) 12:57, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]