Now, that there is a general understanding of what edit filters look like today, let us take a step back and investigate how they came to be this way.
Now that there is a general understanding of what edit filters look like today, let us take a step back and investigate how they came to be this way.
In order to understand the consensus building on the functionality of the extension, I sifted through the archives of the Edit Filter talk page\footnote{\url{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Edit_filter/Archive_1}}.
So, after reading quite some of the discussion surrounding the introduction of the edit filter MediaWiki extention (\url{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Edit_filter/Archive_1}),
I think motivation for the filters was following:
In a nutshell, the motivation for introducing edit filters seems to have been as follows:
bots weren't reverting some kinds of vandalism fast enough, or, respectively, these vandalism edits required a human intervention and took more than a single click to get reverted.
(It seemed to be not completely clear what types of vandalism these were.
As far as I understood, and what made more sense to me, above all, it was about mostly obvious but pervasive vandalism, possibly aided by bots/scripts itself, that was immediately recognisable as vandalism, but take some time to clean up.
As far as I understood, and what made more sense to me, above all, it was about mostly obvious but pervasive vandalism, possibly aided by bots/scripts itself, that was immediately recognisable as vandalism, but takes some time to clean up.
Motivation of extention's devs was that if a filter just disallows such vandalism, vandal fighters could use their time for checking less obvious cases where more background knowledge/context is needed in order to decide whether an edit is vandalism or not.)
The extention's developers felt that admins and vandal fighters could use this valuable time more productively.
Examples of type of edits that are supposed to be targeted:
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@@ -144,6 +144,8 @@ Examples of type of edits that are supposed to be targeted:
