User:Crazycomputers/WPJabber

These are some quick ideas I have for setting up a XMPP server oriented towards Wikipedia users. They are generally notes to mysely, but feel free to edit and suggest things. (But please sign if you do!)

Registration
Any kind of registration will be required to be authorized by the associated Wikipedia account in the form of a message somewhere.


 * This could be scraped by a bot, if it can be confirmed that the account in question actually made the appropriate edit. Then registration could be automatic.
 * Are all valid Wikipedia handles valid on XMPP?
 * These characters are forbidden:
 * Unprintable characters, and newline/tab/space.
 * Probably the most serious cases are ', ", and space. These characters could probably be stripped out.  Maybe spaces replaced with a period?
 * XMPP handles are case insensitive. This would cause problems for users with the same letters but alternate capitalization.  (Though such handles would likely be WP:UN violations anyway.)
 * XMPP handles are case insensitive. This would cause problems for users with the same letters but alternate capitalization.  (Though such handles would likely be WP:UN violations anyway.)

RC patrol
Similar to the #vandalism channels on freenode, there would be a XMPP bot that would report suspicious stuff to the channel.


 * ACL'd channel; only permitted users could join.

Watchlist
If supplied with your password, the bot would hourly scrape your list of watchlisted pages and IM you the second any is edited, with a diff link.


 * A list of watchlisted pages for each user subscribing to the service would be kept.
 * If given a password, the bot would login on the user's behalf and update the user's bot-maintained list with their Wikipedia list.
 * For those not willing to give their password to a bot not under the official Wikimedia umbrella (for security reasons), they could issue commands to the bot to add and remove pages.
 * Maybe offer multiple named watchlists.
 * Named watchlists could be toggled on and off to ignore pages the user is not interested in.
 * Update IMs would include the name of the watchlists the page is in.
 * Users who are not marked "available" would not recieve any messages.

Blacklist
In a similar vein, the same bot would let users flag Wikipedia users/IPs for a certain duration or forever. During that time, edits by that user would be reported to the user who flagged them. This would be immensely useful for RC patrol.

If Wikistalking becomes a problem in association with the bot, this feature could be limited to authorized users.