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Some of the following has been redacted by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in order to protect the Security of the Wiki.

The edit filter (or abuse filter) is a tool of oligarchic oppression masquerading as a MediaWiki extension that "allows privileged users to set specific controls on actions by users, such as edits, and create automated reactions for certain behaviors."[1] In other words, it can be used to help prevent spam, wandalism, and free speech.

User rights

All users can view the edit filter and resulting logs,[2] though only techs can see "hidden" filters (which is most of them) and edit the filters. Additionally, most of the filters are set up not to bother users that are 'autoconfirmed,' although they by no means have to do that.

Inner workings

The filters work by checking edits against certain conditions, such as the blanking (or near-blanking) of pages, the insertion of blacklisted external links, editing by a specific user, certain patters in edit text etc - basically, anything you like (if you're a tech).

Various responses are available for response, including warning the user (meaning that they have to hit submit a second time), banning them, flagging the edit in recent changes and simply disallowing the edit.

Notable filters

Twelve filters have been created so far - of which four have been deleted, and only two are presently in operation. Only six of the twelve are marked as 'public' (i.e. publicly viewable to non-techs) and three of those are deleted.[3]

Blanking articles

Abusefilter #1 is your standard blanking-prevention filter. It fires when a user is not autoconfirmed and changes the article size in bytes from more than 500 to less than 50. Additionally, it checks to ensure that the user is not in the 'recent contributors' to the article, and they are not simply redirecting it.

The filter warns the offending user, and tags the edit with 'blanking page content'.[4]

Protect Maratrean's user page from trolls

Abusefilter #5 (public, deleted) had the de facto effect of protecting Maratrean's user page at the moderator level, while still allowing him to edit it himself. And if the techs will do that, what else will they secretly protect?

It was created by Nx and had no effect beyond simply preventing the edit.[5] ListenerX, B♭maj7, and SuspectedReplicant were all caught by this filter on September 11 2011, the only time that it was ever really used.[6]

Grawp

The mysterious filter #6 (disabled, private) seems to have done nothing except prevent the BoN 89.133.180.171 from replacing the Terrorism-baiting article with some kind of ascii-art.[7]

Deautoconfirm Ponder Stibbons

Abusefilter #7 (public, deleted) seems to be Nx fiddling around to see what kind of mischief he was capable of with his hands on the leavers. It no longer does anything, but does show that Nx was aware of the possibility of using it to promote users.[8]

Prevent Blue from editing specific namespaces

#8 (disabled, public) was Blue's attempt to prevent herself from getting involved in HCMs. It didn't work.

Drumpf

It just adds a warning tag if "Drumpf" was added by a non-bot. ID is #41.

Spam filter

Number #11. It catches spam and trolls. It works by blacklisting a bunch of external links and words. If caught in the spam filter, the edit refuses to submit.

Questionable userpage

This filter (#24) tags the offending edits. It mostly prevents spambots.

References

  1. Extension:AbuseFilter on the MediaWiki website.
  2. Special:ListGroupRights
  3. All filters, including the deleted ones.
  4. Special:AbuseFilter/1
  5. Special:AbuseFilter/5
  6. The filter log for #5
  7. Special:AbuseFilter/6
  8. Special:AbuseFilter/7
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