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This page is for people without the abusefilter-modify permission or people without sufficient knowledge about the coding involved to make requests to enact Abuse filters. Please add a new section at the top of current requests using the following format:

===Filter name===
*'''Task''': What is the filter supposed to do? To what pages and editors does it apply?
*'''Reason''': Why is the filter needed.
- ~~~~

Bear the following in mind:

  • Filters are applied to all edits. Therefore, problematic changes that apply to a single page are likely not suitable for an abuse filter.
  • Each filter takes time to run, making editing (and to some extent other things) slightly slower. The time is only a few milliseconds per filter, but with enough filters that adds up. When the system is near its limit, adding a new filter may require removing another filter in order to keep the system within its limits.
  • There is a limit to what filters can check for. More complex, non-essential tasks, such as those that need to perform a more in-depth check of the page or fetch information that the filter system does not have access to, are better served by separate software, run by an individual user on their own machine or dedicated server such as Tool Labs, rather than those used to actually host Wikipedia.
  • It used to be called the abuse filter for a reason. Contributors are not expected to have read all 200+ policies, guidelines and style pages. Trivial formatting mistakes and edits that at first glance look fine but go against some obscure style guideline or arbitration ruling are not suitable candidates for an abuse filter -- quite apart from performance concerns, if it doesn't harm the project, it is best not to hassle new contributors because of it.
  • To prevent the creation of pages with certain names, MediaWiki:Titleblacklist is usually a better way to handle the problem - see MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist for details.
  • To prevent the addition of problematic external links, please make your request at the spam blacklist.

Current requests[edit]

Migosyrn[edit]

  • Task: Disallow any edits that follow the standard patterns of the socks of User:Migosyrn's edits.
  • Reason: This user has become increasingly hard to handle when it comes to stopping the user. Considering that he has a standard sort of editing style, the edit filter may be helpful here.

My name isnotdave (talk/contribs) 16:28, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Userpage spambots[edit]

  • Task: This filter will check for the characteristic behaviors that most Wikipedia spambots exhibit. Most of them involve creating a page containing a couple of sentences, followed by "my website" or "my site", which is itself followed by a spam link that is labeled (e.g. "Watch movies online free"). This is usually created at the main user page, but I've also seen it done at user talk pages. Deleted examples: User:EvelyneMain2, User:VicenteJensen, User:BettyLyjqf, User:Heidieveret, User talk:Vlolitz, User talk:Jouphabe, and other users listed at Special:BlockList blocked with the reason "spambot". Notice how nearly all of them involve two names put together, without spaces, with only the names capitalized to distinguish between them.
  • Reason: For obvious reasons, to block spambots. Most spambots exhibit this particular behavior, and an edit filter that disallows this (log only for now, of course) would help stop them.

- Gparyani (talk) 04:58, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

All but one of the pages you list were caught by Special:AbuseFilter/499 already. One was also caught by Special:AbuseFilter/466. Both of these filters are currently hidden. Disallow didn't work because of false positives. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:22, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
@Someguy1221: What happens if you change them to warn? Does that hinder the spambots in any way? Oh, and are there too many false positives that a tag can't be used? Gparyani (talk) 23:18, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
466 is set to warn and seems to deter no one. 499's false positive rate could be as high as 50%. Mr.Zbot already reports all 466 hits to AIV for administrator review. Not sure if anyone or anything is monitoring 499's hit log. Someguy1221 (talk) 23:22, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
@Someguy1221: If it's set to tag, would many users complain? Or can anything else be done about it that can reduce the false positive rate? Gparyani (talk) 23:34, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
499 is very accurate in what it's tagging, just not in identifying edits as spam. I suppose a tag that's fairly literal to what the filter actually catches would not be offensive at all. Maybe bring it up at WT:EF for more thoughts? Someguy1221 (talk) 23:46, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Cause of death vandal[edit]

  • Task: the long-term and repeatedly blocked cause of death vandal is a tricky one. They operate from IP ranges far too big to rangeblock (and recently from a different country), and hit random biographical articles, making semi-protection unviable as well. However, the similarity in many of their edits (nearly all of it in infoboxes) suggests to me that a filter could be useful here.
  • Reason To prevent vandalism, some of which (due to its sheer randomness) can remain in articles for a long time. Black Kite (talk) 19:17, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
  • They're still going, see [1]. A good starting point would be to disallow IPs changing (infobox musical artist) to (infobox person), i.e. [2]. The vandal does this because the former template does not have cause of death, etc. on it. Black Kite (talk) 09:11, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
  • And still going. Latest range; 86.174.160.0/22, but there's a whole list here. Can I ask for a "yes" or "can't be done" on this please, so we can work out an alternative plan if not? Thanks. Black Kite (talk) 10:30, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
@Black Kite: This will be a hard filter to make but it might be possible, for at least some of the characteristics. I'll have a think about it but eyes from more experienced EFMs would be appreciated. Sam Walton (talk) 10:04, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
Filter 712 already to logs DoB changes (Black Kite@ Filter log 712 might be useful.). Extend that to the other well-known changes, and limit by IP range. Then the decision is whether to log or block, which can only be decided after watching the logs for a few days. (On a side-note it would be good to have some empirical data on the impact of various strategies, specifically blocking, quick reversion, and more leisurely reversion, on medium term vandals.) All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:57, 5 September 2015 (UTC).

Inexperienced users removing amboxes[edit]

Sometimes, inexperienced users try to remove article maintenance tags (amboxes) from articles.

  • Task: Every time an IP or unconfirmed user removes a {{notability}}, {{news release}}, or {{COI}} ambox from any article, please tag the edit.
  • Reason: This filter will help us to notice edits such as these.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] It's happened many times on Wikipedia that COI users have wrongly removed such amboxes. Often, they use a blank edit summary, making the damage hard to catch. Tagging the edits will make it easier for us to notice and undo the damage.
(Dear Wikipedians: Please freely edit and improve this filter request.)

Thank you. —Unforgettableid (talk) 00:43, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Not done. Detecting each and every tag that gets removed would put a severe strain on the server resources. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:13, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
I thank you for your reply.
  1. OK, we could watch only for the removal of {{notability}} (perhaps the most important ambox) and ignore all other ambox removals.
  2. Let me suggest some non-obvious optimizations (besides the obvious "look at user groups first"). For one thing, we could only look at edits where edit_delta is between -10 and -100. This is an imperfect heuristic, but would save time. Next, we could look only at edits where the edit summary is blank: if there's an edit summary, then this is probably either a section edit or some other non-tag-removal edit. Okay; by now we've already eliminated a huge proportion of edits. Next, we could look at the first byte of either old_wikitext or removed_lines: if it's not '{', we can stop now. Finally, we could search through the contents of removed_lines. We could use contains "otability": a literal search is probably faster than a glob or regexp search. Symbol question.svg Question: Would such a filter still be too CPU-intensive? And if so: which condition would be the biggest problem?
  3. This filter is non-crucial and non-private. If the client has JavaScript on, we could theoretically design the infrastructure to offload all non-crucial, non-private filtering work to the client; if the client has JavaScript off, we could just skip those filters.
—Unforgettableid (talk) 07:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)


Discussion ongoing...

Changing owner field in infoboxes[edit]

  • Task: Disallow non-autoconfirmed editors from changing the |owner= field in certain infoboxes, such as {{Infobox NHL team}} (but likely useful to apply to most sports infoboxes)
  • Reason: Periodic vandalism of articles like this, this and this has been going on for years, but seems to be increasing in frequency lately, perhaps in part because media has taken to writing lazy "someone vandalized Wikipedia hyuk hyuk" articles as of late (e.g.: CSN Chicago). I have no recent examples since I don't follow many articles for other sports teams, but I have seen these types of vandal edits on baseball, basketball and football team pages in the past. I could put together a list of templates if this is doable and desirable.

- Resolute 00:08, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Sigh... Again and again. Resolute 16:58, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
@Resolute: A list of templates to monitor would be useful. Tracking all |owner= changes will be too broad I think. Sam Walton (talk) 11:22, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: - Sure. The NHL infobox listed above (and which would allow me to lift protection on three articles), {{Infobox MLB}}, {{Infobox basketball club}}, {{Infobox NFL team}} and {{Infobox football club}} would be a good start. All five use the same owner= parameter. Resolute 14:00, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: It keeps happening. Fortunately, the NHL playoffs will end soon, but I think we've had to protect at least seven team articles during the post-season for this exact reason. I'm seeing it in the odd NBA article as well. Thanks! Resolute 14:16, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
Another example, this time from MLB. Resolute 16:14, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
Last fresh example I'll add, as there is no further need to demonstrate that this is ongoing, imo; [19]. Thanks, Resolute 15:32, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Okay, one more. So add {{Infobox American football team}} to the list. Resolute 01:20, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
  • @Samwalton9: - Any further thoughts on this? It's still happening. Thanks! Resolute 00:01, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
    • @Resolute: Sorry. I've been meaning to get back to a few of these edit filter requests. Log only at Special:AbuseFilter/735. Sam Walton (talk) 00:16, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
      • Awesome, thanks! Is there anything you want/need me to do while this filter is in logging mode only? Resolute 00:38, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
        • @Resolute: If you're familiar with this kind of vandalism then just keeping an eye on the log would be useful. I know next to nothing about sports teams so it might take me more time to spot vandalism from constructive edits. You can note any false positives here. Also let me know if you see vandalism that isn't caught by the filter which should be. Sam Walton (talk) 00:40, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
          • Will do, thanks. Ownership changes in sports are quite rare, so almost no legitimate changes occur - I think it's been two years for the NHL. The easy way to tell though is if you see a logged entry where the change is to a currently active player. That is pretty much what every example I have posted above is. Resolute 00:47, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
  • @Samwalton9: - I knew this was a problem overall, but 23 hits in a day and a half? Oy. Looking through the log, I see only two edits that aren't obvious vandalism. This one was just changing spacing (needless, but also harmless), but is something I have seen done in the past. Could the filter be modified to ignore edits like those? The second is this, which I think might be vandalism since I can't find any evidence of a person by that name joining ownership, but is ambiguous enough that I can't 100% say it is so. The other 21 hits are all pure vandalism (or a self-revert of vandalism). Resolute 21:41, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
    • @Resolute: Not sure we can do anything about the first edit; unless there's a variable in the filter I'm not aware of (specifically, one which could check the number of lines edited would be useful). We could look for small edit diffs, which would remove edits which also add/remove content to the article and happen to edit the owner field as a result, but I'd like to see if that would be apply to more edits. Will keep watching :) Sam Walton (talk) 21:56, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
      • I'm still watching this. The edits are about 95% vandalism or vandalism clean-up. I saw one where the anon clearly acted in good faith (but got it wrong anyway) and only a handful that seemed plausible or proper - mostly southeast Asian soccer teams. Resolute 17:13, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Replacing text with repeating characters vandalism[edit]

  • Task: To disallow editors that not only add repeating characters to an article but also remove content.
  • Reason: I did a check on the recent changes page that all of the most recent edits that remove content under the "repeating characters" tag filter are vandalism.

- Minima© (talk) 22:06, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

John Galea[edit]

  • Task: Prevent creation of pages using the text of the deleted page John Galea. I'd suggest filtering on anything containing the name "John Galea" (although he's not been averse to mis-spelling his own name in order to get around create protection).
  • Reason: The page has been repeatedly recreated under multiple alternate titles by a veritable army of socks. Salting and rangeblocking are not effective measures against this user.

- Yunshui 雲‍水 15:19, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Yunshui, could you list some of the other article titles? And do you know if this is still an issue? Sam Walton (talk) 00:03, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: Sure - some of the other titles were: John Galea (Singer), John Galea (singer), John- Paul Galea, John Galea!, John Galea (musican), John_Galeaa, John Galeea, John Galea (Paul), Do it my way, (Singer) John Galea, John Galea (performer), John Galea ( the musican ), J.Galea, John Galea (artist)... Not an exhaustive list by any means, but it gives you an idea of the problem. He was still apparently socking as recently as last week (albeit after a hiatus of several months), so I'd say the problem is still ongoing. Thanks for taking a look. Yunshui 雲水 10:12, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: He's still at it... Yunshui 雲水 08:17, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
@Yunshui: Sorry for the delay. Log only at Special:AbuseFilter/724 for now. Sam Walton (talk) 11:18, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Excellent, thanks Sam. Yunshui 雲水 11:23, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
@Yunshui: The filter hasn't been tripped at all, do you know if there have been any recent accounts? Sam Walton (talk) 22:32, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
Nothing since the start of this month that I'm aware of, but on past form he tends to take breaks of several months at a time before reappearing - I'd say it's probably best to leave the filter in place unless it's messing up something else. Yunshui 雲水 07:04, 28 September 2015 (UTC)
@Yunshui: Given the limited capacity we have for edit filters I've disabled this since it wasn't receiving any hits. A search for John Galea or some other text from the article periodically is probably the best bet. Sam Walton (talk) 00:21, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

G-Zay[edit]

  • Task: Prevent edits of libelous information added to WP:BLPs and video game articles by User:G-Zay, specifically on Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura and Square Enix-related articles
  • Reason: See User_talk:G-Zay/Source_problems for article details. After his community ban back in April, and a lengthy and extensive cleanup on articles he had edited (which I took part in), this individual has pretty much continuously come back as an IP-hopping sockpuppet; while occasionally he has made fake accounts, in general the pattern is that an IP pops up, edits a couple pages to promote his agenda, and then, after a few reverts where they plead that they are not G-Zay, the pages get locked and the IP vanishes. A couple weeks later, a new, slightly-different IP appears on a different, related article, and the cycle continues. His latest tactic is to make a grandiose statement about how he has done, as he has accomplished what he intended to. The IP editors continue to act in the exact same method as the sock puppeteer. G-Zay's most recent IPs are 78.146.18.7 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · edit filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) and 193.109.199.11 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · edit filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log) which are located in the United Kingdom. However, I am concerned that he will cause more problems if he continues to abuse IPs to circumvent his ban. I would like the edit filter to have this user's edits permanently prevented until the bot is shut down. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 06:04, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Also, here's some history on the individual. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 04:32, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
@Sjones23: I imagine the reason for this filter having not been made yet is the lack of anything obvious to search for. Can you suggest anything we could search for in edits that would pinpoint this user? Perhaps something relatively unique they tend to write in edit summaries or edits. Sam Walton (talk) 20:36, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
Well, I'll see what can be done about it. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 20:53, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Joshua Hawkins fakearticling[edit]

  • Task: Block edits from adding "Joshua Hawkins"/"Josh Hawkins"+"Motorsports" or "Joshua Hawkins"/"Josh Hawkins"+"MedIevil"/"Medievil" or "Joshua Hawkins"/"Josh Hawkins"+"IndyCar"
  • Reason: This is a serial sockmaster; see Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of MrJoshThehawk. All of these accounts are "throwaways" that appear, create a user talk page with a WP:HOAX/WP:FAKEARTICLE team chart for NASCAR or, in one case, IndyCar that has "Joshua Hawkins Motorsports" with "Josh Hawkins" as a star driver (and before it was salted creating a hoax bio at Joshua Hawkins with articlespace links to same), and then vanish before, a month or two later, popping up under a new account to do the exact same thing. Given the serial nature here blocks are useless; therefore I believe an edit filter is appropriate for putting a stop to this the next time they try. - The Bushranger One ping only 11:35, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
@The Bushranger: If this is still happening, remove the stale tag. PhantomTech (talk) 06:06, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Page deleted, then identically-named page created[edit]

  • Task: Say a page has been deleted, then a non-sysop with an editcount under 5,000 later creates another page with the same title. If this happens, please silently tag the page-creating edit with a tag. The tag should say that a page with that name has already been deleted X number of times.
  • Reason: This will help Wikipedians to more easily notice when a formerly-deleted page has been recreated. This will help make it more obvious to them when they should nominate "new" pages for deletion. It will also make it more obvious when a page title should be SALTed.

Thank you, —Unforgettableid (talk) 08:38, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Unless I'm mistaken, the edit filter can't see the deletion log for a page being edited, so this isn't technically possible. A bot would be better for this. Jackmcbarn (talk) 13:51, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply. AnomieBOT (talk · contribs) runs a task called NewArticleAFDTagger, which tags recreated AfD-deleted pages with {{old AfD multi}}. AFAIK there is no bot which tags recreated PROD-deleted pages or recreated speedily-deleted pages. Where is the best place for me to request that someone provide that functionality? (In vaguely-related news: bugzilla:10331, which requests a page-creation log, is still unfixed despite five years and one patch.) Cheers, —Unforgettableid (talk) 06:03, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
That would be Wikipedia:Bot requests. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:37, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
OK, thank you. So it's best that I go there instead of contacting User:Anomie directly? —Unforgettableid (talk) 19:14, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
Can do both. Wifione Message 19:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
I requested a {{old prod full}} tagger bot at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 57#Bot to tag "PROD Survivors" and "Recreated Articles", and put a {{talkback}} template at User talk:AnomieBOT, but (despite one empty promise I got) nobody coded anything. Many have thought about writing such a bot, but nobody has ever written a practical one; I explained the matter further in my request there. I didn't create a bot request to tag recreations of CSD-deleted pages, but someone else is welcome to do so if they like. —Unforgettableid (talk) 07:53, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
Hmm, I just had an idea for how this can be implemented:

(action = "delete") | (action = "edit" & old_size = 0)

with a per-page throttle.
However whether this might be worth it or better suited for a bot is another question. Triplestop (talk) 03:53, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
That's an interesting solution. I hadn't thought of using the rate limiter like that. It looks like it would work, but it seems a bit hacky and would have a few FPs and oddities, such as tagging the deletion of a newly-created page, and tagging undoing of page blanking. Jackmcbarn (talk) 12:45, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
User:ThePhantomBot is currently logging this type of behavior and I plan to make it do more than that after it has been approved. PhantomTech (talk) 06:47, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Plot summary copyvios[edit]

  • This could be narrowed down to large edit_deltas of non-autoconfirmed editors to plot/synopsis sections, and as such I can see some merit to the proposal. Sam Walton (talk) 15:21, 18 January 2015 (UTC)
  • @MER-C: Logging at Special:AbuseFilter/655 to monitor how much of an issue this is. Sam Walton (talk) 17:46, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
  • @MER-C: Would you mind taking a look through the past few days of diffs to see if sufficient numbers are copyvios for this filter to be worth it? Sam Walton (talk) 17:22, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
  • I had a look and found nothing. However, you've set the size threshold too high -- my experience is that the copyvio plot summaries are usually only one paragraph (3-7 lines) long. I've changed it to 400 bytes. You are also missing the very important scenario when a plot section is added without there being an existing section and an edit summary -- you'll want to search for the addition of a level 2 header like [Pp]lot|[Ss]ynopsis as the trigger. MER-C 12:04, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
  • That's fair, and yes I hadn't thought of that, added a flag for that too. Sam Walton (talk) 20:03, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Disabled for now because I've run out of ideas on how to narrow this. Plot/synopsis/summary is far too vague a search term to be useful. Sam Walton (talk) 19:54, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
MusikAnimal has improved the filter a bit so we'll see how it goes. Narrowed to adding a new section rather than checking for any largeish plot/summary edit to existing ones. Sam Walton (talk) 19:20, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
@MER-C and MusikAnimal: Could you check if the filter is worth continuing? Sam Walton (talk) 12:08, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Lions at Cat Creek[edit]

  • Task: This filter would disallow all edits that add the words "Lion"/"Lions"+"Cat Creek" to any article, and disallowing any addition of the word "lion" that is not "mountain lion" to Cat Creek, Montana. Disallowing edit summaries including "ROOOOOAAARR" in varying levels of capitalisation and number of letters would also be good but might be more difficult.
  • Reason: The saga can be seen at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Catcreekcitycouncil/Archive. Basically, it appears some students at a California high school (as this article is also a target of different vandalism by the same group of socks) are determined to add the fact "there are lions in Cat Creek, Montana" to the article of the community in question. They were engaged, claimed one book 'of which only a few copies exist' was their source (and that all American naturalists were wrong, and that no, it wasn't the archaric useage of "lion" for "mountain lion"), and it finally resulted in a massive sockfarm being unearthed and the article full-protected...and over the last year has seen the article full-protected several times again as these trolls repeatedly game the system for autoconfirmation. The final straw came today, when, with the Cat Creek article locked, they started adding the "there are lions in Cat Creek, Montana" 'fact' to several other articles. Given this behavior it's clear that an edit filter is needed to curb this particular group of sockvandtrolls. - The Bushranger One ping only 08:50, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
    • They've struck again. Semiprotection is ineffective due to gaming the system and the vandalism is spreading to other articles. - The Bushranger One ping only 01:33, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Any ROOOAAARRR filter would have to be employed with care for fear of Bishzilla's wrath. Otherwise, this seems like a simple tweak. Acroterion (talk) 02:27, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
      • Heh. Well, the first part ("Lion/s+Cat Creek") is the more important one here. - The Bushranger One ping only 17:13, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
        • Can somebody please take a look at this? The "lions in montana" trolling is spreading. - The Bushranger One ping only 06:51, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
          • I'm on it. Looks like they came up with methods that Special:AbuseFilter/58 simply can't handle. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 09:16, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
          • I have created Special:AbuseFilter/547 and am working on refining it. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 08:17, 15 April 2013 (UTC)
  • @King of Hearts: @Reaper Eternal: They're back, and once again gaming the system to get around semiprotection. The edit filter really is needed unless we're going to permamently lock down every article related to lions, Montana, or "cat creek". - The Bushranger One ping only 22:28, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
@The Bushranger: Are they still active? PhantomTech (talk) 06:06, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
@PhantomTech: I've seen a few socks of this user recently, but not as many as in the past. Ping me if you need me to reply EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 21:26, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
@PhantomTech: A bit belated due to my busy year, but...these shenangians have continued through at least August, so yeah, this is still a needed thing if the poor Cat Creek article is ever to get un-full-protected. - The Bushranger One ping only 08:27, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Language speaker data[edit]

  • Task: Filter the 'speakers' parameter of {{Infobox language}} for changes, similarly to how changes to height and weight in bio boxes are tagged. (If possible, filter 'date' and 'ref' under the same tag: these are all elements of the population figure.) Should apply to editors without advanced permissions.
  • Reason: Population inflation is a chronic problem with our language articles, and isn't easy to detect if you don't see it happen. Although this wouldn't catch changes to the text, vandals and POV warriors normally change the info box as well. This isn't just a problem with IPs, but often with signed-in POV editors. The date may be changed to make the data look recent. If 'date' and 'ref' can be covered without increasing server load significantly, please include them; otherwise 'speakers' is the main problem.

— kwami (talk) 00:28, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

XSS Filter detect[edit]

  • Task: Block Internet Explorer 8+ users from saving edits that triggered the XSS Filter (Bug 32013). The XSS Filter transforms periods, bracket, and parentheses to the Number sign. One simple implementation might be ##[^{|}<\n>[\];:*]{5,255}?##
  • Reason: Because IE is extremely sneaky doing this after show change displays everything correctly and devs refuse to send the header to stop the filter. We've had many complaints about this.

— Dispenser 06:11, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Dispenser, do you know if this is still an issue? Sam Walton (talk) 09:07, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
Yes, its still an issue 29 months later. This will continue as computers running Internet Explorer 7/8 (End of Life 12 Jan 2016) and have commendable market share. Windows XP has an 18% market share or 1 out of every 6 computers and the highest version of Internet Explorer is 8. Of course WMF could increase interoperability, but they're too distracted by the Web Design Hipsters. — Dispenser 19:52, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
You could match lines removed with \[\[([a-z ]{1,50}\|)?[a-z ]{1,25}]] and lines added with ##([a-z ]{1,50}\|)?[a-z ]{1,25}## to identify the changing links. PhantomTech (talk) 07:33, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: It also occurs with IE9-11, in addition to IE8. Consequently, it should be implemented. See WP:VPT#Characters replaced with #. Gparyani (talk) 00:44, 29 October 2015 (UTC)
@Dispenser and Gparyani: Log only at Special:AbuseFilter/736. I'm not particularly confident in this filter, I think it should probably check removed_lines and use some better regex, but this might be sufficient. Apologies for the delay. Sam Walton (talk) 00:39, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Definitely needs better regex than I'm able to understand, disabled for now. Sam Walton (talk) 09:29, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

This is not a talk page. Please add new requests at the top of this section, not here at the bottom. Thank you!

John Gingles[edit]

  • Task: Prohibit spammers from inserting John Gingles's unpublished memoirs as sources.
  • Reason: See [23] [24] [25] and my recent contribs. This is widespread sneaky abuse.

-- In actu (Guerillero) | My Talk 16:16, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Completed requests[edit]

WPCleaner[edit]

  • Task: Tag edits made with WPCleaner. It's not actually an edit filter request, just a request for the creation of the tag, as it is possible now to create tags than can afterwards be applied to edits through the API. It has been done on frwiki, where there's now a dedicated tag for WPCleaner as there are also other dedicated tags for other tools. As I don't have access to administrator tools, I don't know how to create such tags that are different from edit filters: on frwiki, they appear in Special:Tags with a special source, "Appliquée manuellement par les utilisateurs et les bots" which translates to "Applied manually by users and bots".
  • Reason: It's easier to track what each tool is used for if there's a dedicated tag, instead of having to look at the edit comment to see.

- NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:44, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm not actually familiar with how creating/editing tags is supposed to work now that we can change them, as far as I'm aware the discussion to enable editing or removing tags closed with the consensus that who could edit them could be decided later on, when a custom tag had actually been made. I'll look into this. Sam Walton (talk) 12:24, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
@NicoV: Ok, after much reading I've found that we're waiting on this change. Once the tag editing UI has been restricted I'll be happy to create the tag. Sam Walton (talk) 13:21, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
@Samwalton9: Thank for the answer ! I hope that it means that any registered user could still apply a tag when making an edit (which will be needed for WPCleaner as anyone can use the tool), only preventing users to change tags of an existing edit. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 04:59, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
@NicoV: I believe that's the case, yes. There are two tag userrights as far as I understand, one allows a user to place a tag when making an edit, and the other allows them to edit and delete placed tags. I think the former is in some way enabled for all users. I've left Cenarium a message asking when we can expect the change to go through but I haven't had a response yet. Sam Walton (talk) 15:39, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
@NicoV: Cenarium has made the tag, I'm not sure how it's supposed to be integrated with WPCleaner now, but it's in Special:Tags and at MediaWiki:Tag-WPCleaner. Sam Walton (talk) 13:09, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, I changed WPCleaner configuration, and it works. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 20:25, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
@NicoV: Excellent. Any idea why there are two account creations tagged with it? Sam Walton (talk) 20:49, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Not at all, it's not possible to create accounts with WPCleaner, so it's been done by some other mean. Strange also, is that they were created at the same time. --NicoV (Talk on frwiki) 21:21, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
@NicoV and Samwalton9: The tags were added after the fact by a probable vandalism account, Zoraistanism (talk · contribs), see Special:Log/tag, I've removed them. The tag editing UI is hidden in histories and logs with css but users can still directly access the special page to edit tags (Special:EditTags), or they may have a weird setup where the css hack doesn't work. That's one of the reasons for restricting the userright to update tags (this commit). We just need to watch the tag log from time to time to see it if happens again. Cenarium (talk) 22:27, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Selami Mustafa[edit]

  • Task: Disallow any edit which adds the text string "Selami Mustafa :04/01/1991", either in content or as an edit summary.
  • Reason: Persistent addition of nonsensical edits by IP socks of User:Salamim; see edit histories of 109.92.101.129, 109.92.101.39, 79.101.220.185 and 178.220.93.235 for examples.

- Yunshui 雲水 08:47, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

And 178.220.93.253, 178.220.93.173, 178.220.93.140. Sometimes it's just the string "Selami Mustafa". - DVdm (talk) 09:38, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
And Selamim (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · edit filter log · block user · block log). Burninthruthesky (talk) 09:29, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
@Yunshui: Right. Back it: 178.220.242.165 (talk+ · tag · contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RBLs · block user · block log · cross-wiki contribs · checkuser (log)). Please put a simple end to this. - DVdm (talk) 09:48, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
Log only for now at Filter 725. Sam Walton (talk) 10:00, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
Yes check.svg Done Set to disallow, seems to be working fine. Sam Walton (talk) 12:26, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Samwalton9:. Continues now as 178.220.104.153 (talk+ · tag · contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RBLs · block user · block log · cross-wiki contribs · checkuser (log)) — see edit [26], section header "Selami :04/01/1991". Edit filter should probably be narrowed to anything containing "Selami" - DVdm (talk) 13:03, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@DVdm: It's been through a few iterations, I'm mostly playing catch-up with the changing patterns, but I'm keeping an eye on it and can hopefully stay on top of it. Sam Walton (talk) 18:27, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Denied requests[edit]

Archive.is[edit]

(Apologies if this is not formatted correctly, I was referred to here from the whitelist). – Zumoarirodoka(talk)(email) 11:26, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with this filter or the relevant RfC, so pinging Kww who appears to have been involved in both. To me it looks like we shouldn't be allowing any archive.is links, but if it's the only archive I'm not sure if we should make an exception. Sam Walton (talk) 12:03, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
No exceptions are warranted under these circumstances. Why on earth would we include an unlicensed archive copy of an unlicensed copy when a fully referenced archive exists? —Kww(talk) 15:34, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
Ah, thank you. I've added that link into the article now. – Zumoarirodoka(talk)(email) 15:58, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

AfC Participants[edit]

  • Task: Prevent any users with accounts less than 90 days old and less than 500 undeleted mainspace contributions from editing the Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Participants page.
  • Reason: This list can be edited by any autoconfirmed editor. While any editor can remove editors that do not meet the criteria from the page, in practice this is often not done. Using an edit filter would be the most effective method to solve this problem. I understand that such restrictions for individual pages may be better served by page protection, but page protection does not allow setting a custom limit for account age and edit count. More specifically, I want a filter similar to the one currently used on the Gamergate controversy article. Can this be done, or is there a better solution for this? (There was another proposal a few months ago: Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC to physically restrict access to the Helper Script, but that resulted in no consensus.)

- sst✈ 04:11, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

@SSTflyer: Given the lack of consensus at that RfC for physical restrictions, I'm not sure I would be comfortable with this filter, especially given that the guideline RfC which looks soon to pass prohibits good-faith-edit filters from disallowing edits without a consensus. Sam Walton (talk) 15:02, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
Thanks anyway. Perhaps I should start a discussion at WPRFC first to gain consensus. You may deny my request. sst✈ 15:05, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
Logging such additions would make management of the list easier. Esquivalience t 01:12, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160513125835/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EF/R

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