Wikipedia:Edit filter

This page documents an English Wikipedia WP:AF.

Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Edit filter management
Tags management

AbuseFilter is a tool used to allow privileged users to set specific controls on user activity and create automated reactions for certain behaviors.

The Abuse Filter extension was developed by Werdna with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and went live on the English Wikipedia in March 2009.

The extension allows automatic filters/heuristics to be applied to all edits. Specific rules can be developed, such as "users with fewer than 500 edits are blocked from moving pages to titles which match this regular expression: /poop/". Of course, the rules can get quite a bit more complicated—for example, a rule that blocks all pagemove vandalism with a 70% success rate (and with the option of blocking the IP address of the user making these page moves), with about 2-3 false positives per year (checked on the last year's worth of moves).

All users will be able to view some filters, and all log entries. For all filters, including those hidden from public view, a brief, general summary of what the rule targets will be available, and displayed in the log, the list of active filters, and in any error messages generated by the filter.

We're planning on treading carefully—most abuse filters will be tested for a few days (in "log only" mode) before being brought to full force ("block", "disallow" or "throttle" modes), and to start with, we'll allow only members of a specific group to modify the filters, although this group will be assignable by administrators.

Extension documentation

The below was written when the extension was first written, and may be somewhat out of date.

Filtering criteria

For all of the following, we can do extensive normalisation, regex matching, length comparison and regular comparisons (less than, greater than, equal to) matching, combining different filters with boolean logic.

User

Edit count.
Account age.
Groups.
Email-confirmed status.

Titles (moved-to, moved from included)

Namespace.
Title.
Full text.
Restrictions and protection status.

Action

The action type (edit, move or createaccount).
Edit summary.
Contents of the edit.

Throttling

We can require that an action be done at a certain rate by the same IP address, account, /16 range, account-creation-date, and/or to the same page, for a consequence (below) to be invoked.
Any of the above conditions can be combined to produce a separate rate-limiter. For instance, we can group all accounts created on the same date, from the same /16, for the purposes of rate-limiting.
Any actions set for that filter will occur if, and only if, the rate-limiter is tripped. This reduces false-positives by making the filter apply only if the same user is consistently tripping a particular filter, rather than a single false-positive.

Actions which can be assigned in response to filtered edits

If a user triggers a filter, AbuseFilter can apply any of the following sanctions based on the severity of the offense:

All actions triggering a filter are logged at a special page.
The user's action can be tagged for further review.
The user can be warned that their actions may be unconstructive.
The user's action may be disallowed.
The user's account may have its autoconfirmed status suspended for a random period between 3 and 7 days.
The user's account may be blocked from editing, along with all IP addresses used in the last 7 days.
The user's account may be removed from all privileged groups (such as sysop, bot, rollbacker).

Note: Individual sanctions can be disabled selectively.

Monitoring

All edits triggering an action will produce a report at Special:AbuseLog. On this page, a brief log entry is entered. Users with the appropriate permissions may view the log summary. Users with certain higher permissions may view details on the log entry. This includes all information available to the filter when it ran, and may be useful for debugging purposes. Users with the highest level of log-viewing permissions may view private data about the action which caused the log event, such as the user's IP address. See #Permissions for more details on the permissions structure.

Sample abuse log entries

06:43, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered an abuse filter, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: warn,disallow; Filter description: Test Filter
06:43, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered an abuse filter, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: none; Filter description: Test Filter

Sample detailed abuse log entries

06:43, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 1, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: warn,disallow; Filter description: Test Filter (details)
06:43, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 2, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: none; Filter description: Test Filter (details)
06:42, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 1, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: warn; Filter description: Test Filter (details)
06:42, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 2, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: none; Filter description: Test Filter (details)
06:22, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 1, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: warn,disallow; Filter description: Test Filter (details)
06:22, 23 June 2008: Andrew (Talk | contribs | block) triggered filter 2, making a edit on Main Page. Actions taken: none; Filter description: Test Filter (details)

The details link brings up a screen like that on the right.

Safeguards

To protect the wiki against poorly-configured filters, a technical limit is imposed on the maximum percentage of actions that will trigger a given filter. Other technical limits are in the process of being written.

Notification

All notifications are based on the template {{abuse filter warning}}.

Standard notifications shown to a user triggering a filter action:

Message name Message text

abusefilter-disallowed

An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive, so it has been disallowed. If this edit is constructive, please report this error. Disruptive behavior may result in being blocked from editing.

Report error

abusefilter-blocked MediaWiki:Abusefilter-blocked

abusefilter-degrouped

This action has been automatically identified as harmful.

Consequently, it has been disallowed, and, since your account is suspected of being compromised, all rights have been revoked. If you believe this to have been in error, please contact a bureaucrat with an explanation of this action, and your rights may be restored. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: $1

abusefilter-autopromote-blocked

An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive, and it has been disallowed. In addition, your account has been temporarily restricted from executing some sensitive operations. If this edit is constructive, please report this error.

Generic warning message is below. Admins are advised to use custom warnings.

Message name Message text

abusefilter-warning

Warning: An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive. Please be aware that vandalism may result in revocation of your editing privileges. If this edit is constructive, please click 'Publish changes' again, and report this error.

Some existing filters and their warnings:

Filter and message Message text

3: blanking articles

blanking

An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive, so it has been disallowed. Please do not remove all the text of Wikipedia pages. The resulting blank pages are harmful to Wikipedia because they confuse readers.

If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If this edit is constructive, please report this error.

If this page is a duplicate of another, please redirect it to an appropriate existing page.
If this page has been vandalised, please revert it to the last legitimate version.
If you feel that the content of this page is inappropriate, please edit the page and replace it with appropriate content or leave a message on the talk page.
If you believe this page should be deleted altogether, please see articles for deletion for information on how to proceed.
If this page is a biography of a living person that is problematic, please report the problem at the noticeboard.

If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Help Desk.

Report error

30: large deletions

removal

Warning: An automated filter has identified this edit as removing a large amount of content. While some material on Wikipedia should be removed, such as vandalism and false or libelous information, we discourage removal of content without a valid reason. If you believe that your removal is constructive, please go to the bottom of this page and press 'Publish changes' to continue (be sure to enter an edit summary if you have not done so already). If you did not remove a large amount of content, and you believe that this edit is constructive, please report this error.

18: test edits

testeditwarn

MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-testeditwarn

If a filter is set to warn and disallow, then a user clicking "Save page" will alternatively see that warning and standard disallowed message.

Known issues

When the extension is initially installed, the available actions will not include blocking or removing from privileged groups. This restricted usage has been determined by community consensus, and if the extension is successful, the community may decide to enable the block, rangeblock or degroup actions for use on this wiki.

The full technical details of implementation are available on the bug (bug 15684).