Wikipedia talk:Recent changes patrol/Archives/2009/September

Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard
Hi, with the introduction of the Article Wizard, there are now some new hidden categories attached to pages created through it, which provides an additional route for checking new additions. See Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard. Rd232 talk 15:33, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Low-profile namespaces
For the last couple of weeks I've been reviewing recent changes for some of the lower-profile namespaces -- Category, Category Talk, File Talk -- and I notice that vandalism, test edits, non-constructive comments, etc., all have a tendency to survive much longer on these pages than in the higher-profile namespaces. That's not a big surprise since there are fewer "eyes" on such pages. But I was struck by how what would be extreme and rapidly reverted vandalism in the mainspace, such as replacing the content of a page with obscenities or "Kiroy wuz here"-type text, could survive for much longer. Category pages seem to be a particular target for this. For example, this diff shows a case where the first line of a page was replaced with vulgarity that was untouched for over two and a half days. Here are some other cases of defaced category pages, lasting nine hours, 12 hours, and 16 hours, and 13 days. There could be ones that have lasted even longer, but "Recent changes" only goes back so far. None of these are subtle cases and they all came from IP editors.

I'm wondering if there is something that could/should be done to more closely monitor the lower-profile namespaces for vandalism, and perhaps sweep them for old vandalism that may still be undetected. Is this an issue that has been brought up before, or am I noticing something new here? --RL0919 (talk) 17:44, 25 September 2009 (UTC)