User:Tony Sidaway/vandalism
vandalism[edit]
vandalism is a web page that will plot the history of vandalism on any Wikipedia page on a number of the most popular Wikipedias. Output is in the form of a two-color histogram showing overall edits in red and vandalism reverts in green.
vandalism is written as a CGI script in Guile, a dialect of Scheme adopted by GNU as its preferred scripting language.
The script currently takes the name of any page on the following Wikipedias and looks up all edits on that page, counting those that look like vandalism reverts.
- English · French · German · Spanish · Portuguese · Italian · Swedish · Norwegian · Dutch · Polish · Turkish
For each week or month in the range, depending on the period selected, it plots the number of vandalism reverts, the total number of edits, and also tabulates the proportion of edits which are vandalism reverts. Vandalism is not easy to recognise electronically, but vandalism reverts are fairly easy to recognise, so they are used as a proxy for vandalism.
I prefer to program in Lisp-like languages because they have a very simple syntax and are easy to use. The integration of the SQL query into Scheme in this example is especially pretty and it was a great pleasure to write. Scheme is an especially spare and elegant variant of lisp with affinities to Common Lisp.
Comments[edit]
Brilliant -- of course, this is a great tool for watching all edits, not just vandalism. Any chance article size could be tracked on the same graph? --—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.63.250.89 (talk • contribs) 15:14, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
- I'll give it a bit of thought, but the answer is probably no. This is a dreadfully simple-minded little script, it only looks at the revision edit summary to see if it looks like a vandalism revert. I don't know an easy way of measuring article size (other than extracting the bloody thing and counting the bytes). --Tony Sidaway|Talk 02:41, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
It's missing most reverts. Try, say Horse in English Wikipedia for the current month. The tool reports 3 reverts; there have been at least 10 in the last week. --71.141.1.150 18:22, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
- Looks like the usefulness of this tool on English Wikipedia has somewhat degraded since I wrote it. Now so many editors are using javascript-based tools to revert vandalism. Looks like I'll have to catalog all the different way in which these tools normally describe a vandalism revert. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:34, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Hello Tony, I use a local table of the french chapter for making the same thing with vandalism. I saw in your code (for the french part) that you have only few indicators for the "how is calling a vandalism by wikipedians in action". I give you a little list I made (sure it's not complete but it's already that): "revocation", "revert", "rv", "vandalisme", "restauration", "retour à une version précédente", "restitution", "reversion". But sometimes we say "petit revert" for just erasing a sentence. Sigh. When I saw your tool, I was first like a stupid student "WTF I miss something and I made all by myself" but now I understand that we have the same problems. Jmskobalt 09:12, 5 October 2006 (UTC)