An idea to help with RC Patrol.
From the user perspective, it would work as follows:
There would be a central IRC channel, like #wikipedia-rc-slice; it would redirect people who joined it to a channel just like the normal IRC RC feed except that it would scroll slower, like one edit per minute, rather than the current 87 edits per minute that I measured just now. However, every edit would be still be seen by someone.
This would be acomplished by slicing up the RC feed; each time someone joined the main channel, the server would forward them to the slice with the fewest people, in order to spread attention evenly over the various slices. There would be N slices, where each one would show every Nth edit to the 'pedia, as well as a small random selection to cut down on something slipping through the cracks.
That would allow RC patrollers to work slower, without worring that they are missing stuff; someone would be watching every edit.
Possible implementation
edit- A set of 10 IRC bots, which were all fed by a listing bot in the RC channel, and which just spit out 1/10+random selection of the RC feed - probably could be based off the #wikipedia-en-vandalism bot.
- Each of the bots would be in a seperate channel like #wikipedia-rc-slice-1, #wikipedia-rc-slice-2, etc.
- A forwarding bot that reviewed the # of people in the various slice-1, slice-2, etc. channels, and forwarded people from the central channel to the one with the least number of people - probably could be based off of the flood forwarding techniques already available.