It's nice that this thread seems to have gone back on track somewhat.
Thoughts about the system of referencing videos:
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As far as my script is concerned, it is indeed a bit cleverer than that (even if I do say so myself). It scrapes the VRNs from the titles of all the videos in a channel, and will detect and capture any of the following formats:
"AAAnnnA" "AAAnnA" "AAAnA" "AnnnAAA" "AnnAAA" "AnAAA" "AAnnAAA" "AAA#nnnA" "AAA#nnA" "AAA#nA" "Annn#AAA" "Ann#AAA" "An#AAA" "AAnn#AAA"
(where A is an upper case letter, n is a number and # is a space)
with appropriate restrictions on which letters and numbers are allowed in each position of each format. There are very few false positives, but it misses those that have non-standard VRNs; for example, it missed Mikey's 678CR one, which is a weird personal number plate. The weird ones could well be handled by a tag or prefix as you suggest. It then searches the whole of YouTube for each of the VRNs listed, both with and without the spaces, and displays the ones that have the registration number in the title.
However, I developed the script for fun because I enjoy writing programs and playing with public APIs, and whilst it works well ("does the job right"), I'm not convinced that it currently is of much use ("does the right job"). As I said before, videos of repeat offenders are currently few and far between, so the benefit is not clear. If Mikey is right and the use of cameras (and posting) becomes very common, then that may change, but right now hardly seems worth it (though I'm happy to contribute the code and help).
Perhaps we could come back to that idea as a support mechanism for people who want to make official complaints some time in the future. However, there is another point in that context regarding the usefulness of the script. The benefit of the script is just that it can go through the whole history of a channel and check for other videos featuring the same vehicle for all of them (often hundreds). For an individual who wishes to check whether a particular vehicle has been featured before, it is easy just to do a search on YouTube (which uses the Google search engine). So again, I'm not sure of the benefit.
Regarding the decision on whether to report a particular incident to the police (or Roadsafe for those lucky enough to have it or similar), it is up to the individual to decide that. I think the community aspect boils down to reaching some common understanding of which incidents are worth reporting and which are not, and that could be useful given the amount of disagreement on here. Of course, that is more to do with whether the complainant is likely to get anywhere than whether the incident itself has merit, and sharing experience of that could be (is already?) useful.
The other way in which videos could be useful is their use for campaigning. I think the key issue right now with the effectiveness of videos for this is that there are far too many of them and, whilst huge numbers of these do show bad and dangerous driving, most of them do not make an impact on the viewer. The comments in this thread whenever videos have been linked to illustrates this very well. Remember, this is not about whether the incident portrayed was worthy of posting, it is about whether it has sufficient impact to be useful for campaigning purposes. That is where gathering together a collection of relatively high impact videos from different cyclists could by useful and IMO is where we might usefully focus our attention. The process you outlined could be useful as a basis for that.
(But these are my opinions, of course.)
