Topic on Help talk:ChangeContentModel

ping Quiddity (WMF)

Some of this stuff just seems to be a new ready avenue to have vandals break pages, especially some of our prolific vandals. It seems relatively easy to have a list of pages and individually convert them using the relevant special: page and just hammer away causing problems until someone intervenes. It would take a level of observation and would now seem to require two places to rollback a change, 1) on the page, and 2) via the logs; this is a considerable change, and not one that will be evident to many.

Do we have a ready means through abuse filters to identify AND to prevent the use of this function? For many WMF wikis the pages will be set to be wikitext and should only ever be wikitext. As such the wikis should be able to write an abuse filter to stop pages in certain namespaces from being converted, similarly there needs to be an abuse filter mechanism to simply identify this sort of change. It is a lot easier to be able to watch abuselog for vandalism rather than to now also keep an eye on a very busy special:log

(I'm not involved officially, and I meant to use my volunteer account for the documentation assistance (as I did in latter edits). I don't have enough technical understanding yet to have a personal opinion on the issues.)

Hi @Billinghurst:)

Yes, it does provide a new place for vandals to do bad things, but that's true of basically any new feature sadly :( This feature is rate limited at the same level as page moves.

To clarify, you only need to revert such a change in one place (rollback, undo, or special page). And I filed phab:T145489 about fixing the AbuseFilter integration - it was about half working currently. I also have an open change to add a change tag to edits that change the content model of a page so you can just watch recent changes instead of needing to follow a separate log.

Apologies Quiddity, I should have known better.

Thanks for that extra information @legoktm and the valuable defences. I think that there is value in noting the additional features (defences) to wikitech-ambassadors so that admins know of these measures rather than have to go hunting. I can see for numbers of sisterwikis may prefer to lock down certain namespaces for wikitext, until they can envision why other content types are determined to be required.

No. It's by default available only for autoconfirmed users.