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Wikidata Tours pollutes Recent Changes
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Description

When doing Recent Change patrol, changes made to items like Q16943273 for Wikidata Tours often appear as "Likely have problems". This wastes the time of Recent Change patrollers and has been going on for several years now.

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata_talk:Tours&oldid=1128233255#Recent_Changes
@matej_suchanek suggests having the tour interface add a tag that would allow tour items to be excluded from Recent Changes. This would be one way to resolve the problem.

Current solution:

  • Abuse filter 138 on Wikidata adds the tour-item tag to all edits to tour items.
    • Whenever a new tour is deployed, the filter needs to be updated.
    • The filter is executed every time someone makes an edit to Wikidata. On average, the execution takes 120-130µs, so it shouldn't cause troubles.

Possible improvements:

  • It isn't possible to hide edits with (this or another) tag from recent changes. See T174349.
  • The filter can tag edits not done using the script for tours. Patrollers should still check the edit as any other, though it's more apparent to them it's a tour item.

Event Timeline

On Commons, HotCat somehow manages to do this, see e.g. this edit. (I don’t know how, though. I see edits from @Perhelion in connection with this feature.)

This is a quite important thing to fix because I'm working on several more tours and its likely the number of people who will use the tours will increase a lot

@matej_suchanek do you know what tag would be needed to tell recent changes to ignore it? This feels like a first step before finding out who could add it

what tag would be needed to tell recent changes to ignore it?

That's a good question. Tags are normally defined to suggest the edit is bad, so the interface allows you to include by tag, but I don't see an option to exclude by tag. Obviously we don't want to create a "not-wikidata-tours" tag. This might also need support from a Recent Changes developer.

@Bovlb thanks, I'm really out of my depth, who might know about this stuff?

@Mrjohncummings asked me to share this comment I posted at Wikidata:

From the discussion so far, there seem to be two proposed solutions:

  1. Add an edit filter that checks the item id against a hard-coded list and adds a tag. Any admin can do this, but we would need to (remember to) update the filter whenever we create new topics.
  2. Change the WikiTours interface to add a tag. This would be the more elegant solution, but would require work from a WikiTours interface developer. I don't know who that is, and I don't know how to find out.

who might know about this stuff?

I don't know. It's not easy for us "outsiders" to know which developer is responsible for what. Part of the point of filing bug reports here is that they can be triaged and assigned appropriately. If that never happens, then I don't know how to proceed.

@Aklapper how would we find out which developers or which teams work on things like this? Thanks :)

I don't see an option to exclude by tag

Worth noting that tags are listed in the RC UI, so even if we cannot use it to exclude wikitour edits, an RC patroller could still see the tag before performing deeper investigation. I believe people are also using various tools wrapped around recent changes, and I cannot speak for them.

There are two ways of tagging these edits:

  • When a user starts a tour and interacts with the interface, the requests need to send tags= parameter.
  • Create a dedicated edit / abuse filter and tag edits to these items. (The list needs to be maintained in the filter.)

When I suggested not having a filter for this and making this a feature of Wikidata tours, I didn't realize we would have to "hack" the usual interface since users use it during the tour. So if this is too difficult, we can go with the edit filter.

Nevertheless, it should be clear what the tags will be used for. Do we want to tag only edits that are done using the tour scripts and ignore the rest? Or just every edit to these items? Should it ignore trusted users?

(By the way, RC filter for excluding edits with a tag is tracked in T174349.)

Just to add another perspective on this issue, I have several times come close to blocking/warning a new user for vandalism before I realized they were taking a WikiTour. Having any sort of tag on the edit would be useful.

OK, so what are the next steps? I guess:

  1. Decide on an approach
  2. Find someone who can implement it
  3. Add some kind of instructions for people making tours if needed

I wasted more of my time today following up on a "vandal" who turned out to be doing the WikiTour.

@matej_suchanek @Bovlb how can we find someone who can implement a solution?

Created filter 138, which tags edits as tour-item. Feel free to amend the list of items if necessary.

@matej_suchanek I'm sorry, could explain a bit more? Is this implemented and all tour edits will now have this flag?

Exactly, the filter tags all edits to tour items. Their list is inside the filter and can be amended by a Wikidata admin.

However, this does not hide the edits from recent changes, watchlists, etc. and there is currently no interface for this.

Exactly, the filter tags all edits to tour items. Their list is inside the filter and can be amended by a Wikidata admin.

However, this does not hide the edits from recent changes, watchlists, etc. and there is currently no interface for this.

This is great, thanks so much for this, could you edit the description explaining what has been done and what could be changed

Thanks @matej_suchanek . That's certainly helpful, and maybe we can take it the rest of the way with some CSS, but I don't see any hits on that filter yet.

I manually checked all listed items but none of them has been edited since I created the filter.

I see edits, and I was able to highlight them in recent changes by adding the following to my Common.css:

.mw-tag-tour-item { background-color: #CCFFCC; }

Thanks!

I see edits, and I was able to highlight them in recent changes by adding the following to my Common.css:

.mw-tag-tour-item { background-color: #CCFFCC; }

Thanks!

Great, is there anywhere this info could be added for others doing a similar thing to you?

Great, is there anywhere this info could be added for others doing a similar thing to you?

I'm not sure. I left a note on this talk page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Counter-Vandalism#Now_possible_to_highlight_wiki-tour_items_in_recent_changes

Note that T174349: Allow tag filter on Special:RecentChanges and Watchlist to be inverted (enable the not operator) has finally been implemented. Instead of using CSS, just exclude (highlight) the tag from your default recent changes view. I guess this task can be closed.