Hey kids, looks like Recent Changes is getting just a little bit out of hand. Currently, the number on my Chrome extension says there are 2,497 unpatrolled edits. As promised, this isn’t me launching a campaign to get everybody to patrol more. I think, considering that most unpatrolled edits are videos and we seem to lack in people willing to patrol videos, that adding videos to articles should be put on hiatus until RC gets under control. After getting endorsed by a couple people in IRC who are having a rather interesting conversation about how much it sucks to patrol videos in recent changes, I figured it’d be worth mentioning. Anybody else agree that video adding should be put on hold for the time being? Are there any good tips to knocking down the numbers for videos? (ps, patrol more)
system
2
Please for the love of God, do NOT patrol videos without watching them nor go on a video patrolling spree just to get the numbers down. It’s been done before a bazillion times and it’s very disturbing.
Jordan
3
Not quite sure that videos alone are the source of the problem - there’s a TON of foreign companies advertising on their userboxes (sets of 4 each) that seemed to have come up over the past few days. Just in Bunch Patrol this morning I’ve been reviewing at least 300-350 of them, and there’s more after that.
Ugh, so many videos. I was going to ask if we could each patrol a few videos a day *cough* Bob *cough*. Anyway, and please don’t add videos without watching the video curation! I’ve seen a few that had nothing to so with the article.
http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Video-Curation
June Days
I came to one set about Electronic cranes, and they aren’t the problem here. The other day @Jordan
, there were over 1200 videos to patrol in RCP, and now it’s over 2500-2600. Need help here. Between BudgetTruckRentals(misquoting the name, sorry) and two other users, and a few other newbies to Video Adding, these edits need patrolling. It was an video-adding spree by multiple people.
Jordan
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@Byankno1
Check out Bunch Patrol now; that’s where I’m looking. You’ll see enough that you’ll need to scroll down quite a bit
Bunch patrol, that’s where a whole bunch of editors got together and collaborated on one specific user page? I’ve done that briefly about a year ago.
If you’ve been keeping up with IRC, you’ll find that the videos are the problem right now. most are videos. There’s been this big video-adding spree the past few weekends by some known editors(not me, unfortunately).
Jordan
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@Byankno1
I didn’t say the amount of unpatrolled videos wasn’t a problem. I keep an eye on Bunch Patrol and when you have 300+ listings of advertising userboxes, multiplied in sets of 4, that contributes adversely to RC all the more so.
system
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The main problem is NOT videos. I have been monitoring it off and on & I can assure you guys that there was not a 700-1000 spike overnight nor this past weekend
I’m bored of advertising userboxes. Does anybody know what we can do to stop these being created so often? It’s like there’s a big PR company out there who’s cottoned on to the fact that wikiHow provides free “listings”… are they all coming from similar IP addresses? I’ve just patrolled through a few now and they’re all formatted exactly the same… :S
Jordan
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I agree. From what I’ve observed anyway, the overwhelming majority of these are “fly-by” advertisements on the userboxes and the user who created them never makes another edit.
I don’t suppose there’s much we can do about it really - I doubt requiring an email on sign-up would help much. The other option is to remove User pages from RC altogether - most of the time we could just live and let live, but there is always the possibility that something really nasty could pass through
But bare in mind that other websites don’t check every person’s profile when they sign up
OK I just patrolled ~330 userpage edits, 99.9% of which were by businesses from India and formatted in exactly the same way, which suggests to me we’re being taken advantage of.
I was doing this too, and yes, we are. Either way, RC is almost sane now at 1078. And almost all the rest really *are* videos. I agree with Monica that we should have a temporary moratorium on adding videos until we get this under control.
I agree with the hold on the videos or at the most; a removal from the count altogether. As for the connection in the large amount of commercial userpages, I’ll go see if I can find that connection myself.
Well, a lot of people patrol, but only a small fraction of those people do video patrol. It is time consuming (I can see why people don’t want to do it) and it requires the old fashioned way that many contributors are unfamiliar with. Maybe we can throw videos in the the RC patrol (I don’t know if this is even possible), so patrollers would come across a video once in a while, but not to the point where patrolling videos becomes a tedious chore.
system
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My vote? Delete them all on sight… but that’s definitely mean spirited and curmudgeonly of me. Anyone got a good idea on how to block, avoid, delete, prevent, educate or knock sense into these guys?
system
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I have to admit I saw that yesterday - I was amazed at the frenzied edit activity that must have happened (it was about 2600 when I logged on briefly last night). The strange thing was when I went to the patrol page there was only one or two edits for me to do before the Sunflower page came calling. I had surmised that a few of those 2600 were patrolling edits I had done, (logically I can’t patrol my own patrols) but it wasn’t as many as that, so I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant - perhaps it had something to do with the skip button… The advertising I think comes mostly from the google advertising connection - a user who is not logged in would see the ads so dodgy companies would naturally try and take advantage of that for free (I know google adverts is the income stream for the site). If we are always logged in, we quickly forget just how much advertising really is on the page, even though non account holders can switch it off. I’ve even seen people set up user pages as advertisements - not putting any articles or article edits on (Later Edit: an example of this is User:Dorothyguth ) - AND some of these users write in to other editors on how they can advertise better on their user page! I don’t know if there is a wikihow constitution and wether a user page content may have an NFD placed on it, very much a grey area… Advertisements might be about 5-10% of the edits I see. I agree with most comments the videos should be watched first, but that would take a long time. It might be best to separate the video patroling to a new, different “Patrol Video” section on the community page. That way if someone wants to dedicate the time to it they can go right to them, rather than having to sift through all the usual patrol things. I had considered a moratorium or a maximum per day of how many videos may be added, but that would simply annoy people and go against wiki being something everyone can edit. My two cents : ) Edit: No idea how to get sense into them - a free site is free even if the article is deleted, it adds to their company presence & history on the web. It annoys the patrollers far more than the writer (who copies and pastes by the look of some of them) or the readers as they only get 1 or 2 hits before they get tagged.
