An idea for a new bot, basically a Thread running to notify people of suspicious activity.

Anytime either:

• an edit results in a wiki page consisting of a single line or a single token (that is not a plugin or setting a variable like an alias); or
• an edit that results in the page being cleared (or only consisting of whitespace)
• the edit itself consists of a single line consisting of a single token (as opposed to a spell check fix),

a NoiseBot could flag the edit as suspicious. What the NoiseBot would do is unclear. It could add a link to an auto-maintained SuspiciousPages page, generate an RSS feed or email, etc. We could use a single WikiEventListener that would react to end-of-edit-session events.

The idea here being that there are some very typical noise edits that could be handled or at least flagged automatically. -- MurrayAltheim

Discussion#

Another type of suspicious edit - "clearing an entire page" might not be classified as noise, but it should probably be flagged too somehow, somewhere.. It could just be a simple check for editedText.trim().equals( "" )

--David Au, 01-Mar-2007

David, I've added that as a bullet item above. -- MurrayAltheim