On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Jimmy Wales<jwales(a)wikia-inc.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Greg, I think your email sounded a little negative at the start, but not
> so much further down. I think you would join me heartily in being super
> grateful for people doing this kind of analysis. Yes, some of it will
> be primitive and will suffer from the many difficulties. But
> data-driven decisionmaking is a great thing, particularly when we are
> cognizant of the limitations of the data we're using.
>
> I just didn't want anyone to get the idea (and I'm sure I'm reading you
> right) that you were opposed to people doing research. :-)
Absolutely— No one who has done thing kind of analysis could fail to
appreciate the enormous amount of work that goes into even making a
couple of simple seemingly "off the cuff" numbers out of the mountain
of data that is Wikipedia.
Making sure the numbers are accurate and meaningful while also clearly
explaining the process of generating is in and of itself a large
amount of work, and my gratitude is extended to anyone who contributes
to those processes.
I've long been a loud proponent of data driven decision making. So I'm
absolutely not opposed to people doing research, but just as you said—
we need to be acutely aware of the limitations of the research. Weak
data is clearly better than no data, but only when you are aware of
the strength of the data. Or, in other words, knowing what you don't
know is often *the most critical* piece of information in any decision
making process.
In our eagerness to establish what we can and do know it can be easy
to forget how much we don't know. Some of the limitations which are
all too obvious to researchers are less than obvious to people who've
never personally done quantitative analysis on Wikipedia data, yet
many of these people are the decision makers that must do something
useful with the data. The casual language used when researchers write
for researchers can magnify misunderstandings. It was merely my
intent to caution against the related risks.
I think the most impactful contributions available for researchers
today are less in the area of the direct research itself but are
instead in advancing the art of researching Wikipedia. But the two go
hand in hand, we can't advance the art if we don't do the research.
The latter type is less sexy and not prone to generating headlines,
but it is work that will last and generate citations for a long time.
Measurements of X today will be soon forgotten as they are replaced by
later analysis of the historical data using superior techniques.
That my tone was somewhat negative is only due to my extreme
disappointment in that our own discussion of recent measurements has
been almost entirely devoid of critical analysis. Contributors patting
themselves on the back and saying "I told you so!" seem to be
outnumbering suggestions that the research might mean something else
entirely, though perhaps that is my own bias speaking. To the extent
that I'm wrong about that I hope that my comments were merely
redundant, to the extent that I'm right I hope my points will invite
nuanced understanding of the research and encourage people to seek out
and expose potentially confounding variables and bad-proxies so that
all our knowledge can be advanced.
If this stuff were easy it would all be done already. Wikipedia
research is interesting because it is both hard and potentially
meaningful. There is room and need for contributions from everyone.
Cheers!
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:06 AM, Robert Rohde<rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> When one downloads a dump file, what percentage of the pages are
> actually in a vandalized state?
Although you don't actually answer that question, you answer a
different question:
[snip]
> approximations: I considered that "vandalism" is that thing which
> gets reverted, and that "reverts" are those edits tagged with "revert,
> rv, undo, undid, etc." in the edit summary line. Obviously, not all
> vandalism is cleanly reverted, and not all reverts are cleanly tagged.
Which is interesting too, but part of the problem with calling this a
measure of vandalism is that it isn't really, and we don't really have
a good handle on how solid an approximation it is beyond gut feelings
and arm-waving.
The study of Wikipedia activity is a new area of research, not
something that has been studied for decades. Not only do we not know
many things about Wikipedia, but we don't know many things about how
to know things about Wikipedia.
There must be ways to get a better understanding, but we many not know
of them and the ones we do know of are not always used. For example,
we could increase our confidence in this type of proxy-measure by
taking a random subset of that data and having humans classify it
based on some agreed-on established criteria. By performing the review
process many times we could get a handle on the typical error of both
the proxy-metric and the meta-review.
The risk here is that people will misunderstand these shorthand
metrics as the real-deal and the risk is increased when we encourage
it by using language which suggests that the simplistic understanding
is the correct one. IMO, highly uncertain and/or outright wrong
information is worse than not knowing when you aren't aware of the
reliability of the information.
We can't control how the press chooses to report on research, but when
we actively encourage misunderstandings by playing up the significance
or generality of our research our behaviour is unethical. Vigilance is
required.
This risk of misinformation is increased many-fold in comparative
analysis, where factors like time are plotted against indicators
because we often miss confounding variables
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding).
Stepping away from your review for a moment, because it wasn't
primarily a comparative one, I'd like to point out some general
points:
For example, If research finds that edits are more frequently reverted
over time is this because there has been a change in the revision
decision process or have articles become better and more complete over
time and have edits to long and high quality articles always been more
likely to be reverted? Both are probably true, but how does the
contribution break down?
There are many other possibly significant confounding variables.
Probably many more than any of us have thought of yet.
I've always been of the school of thought that we do research to
produce understanding, not just generate numbers and "Wikipedia
becomes more complete over time, less work for new people to do" is a
pretty different understanding from "Wikipedia increasing hostile
towards new contributors" are pretty different understandings but both
may be supported by the same data at least until you've controlled for
many factors.
Another example— because of the scale of Wikipedia we must resort to
proxy-metrics. We can't directly measure vandalism, but we can measure
how often someone adds "is gay" over time. Proxy-metrics are powerful
tools but can be misleading. If we're trying to automatically
identify vandalism for a study (either to include it or exclude it) we
have the risk that the vandals are adapting to automatic
identification: If you were using "is gay" as a measure of vandalism
over time you might conclude that vandalism is decreasing when in
reality "cluebot" is performing the same kind of analysis for its
automatic vandalism suppression and the vandals have responded by
vandalizing in forms that can't be automatically identified, such as
by changing dates to incorrect values.
Or, keeping the goal of understanding in mind, sometimes the
measurements can all be right but a lack of care and consideration can
still cause people to draw the wrong conclusions. For example,
English Wikipedia has adopted a much stronger policy about citations
in articles about living people than it once had. It is
*intentionally* more difficult to contribute to those articles
especially for new contributors who do not know the rules then it once
was.
Going back to your simple study now: The analysis of vandalism
duration and its impact on readers makes an assumption about
readership which we know to be invalid. You're assuming a uniform
distribution of readership: That readers are just as likely to read
any random article. But we know that the actual readership follows a
power-law (long-tail) distribution. Because of the failure to consider
traffic levels we can't draw conclusions on how much vandalism readers
are actually exposed to.
Interestingly— you've found a power-law distribution in vandalism
lifetime. Is it possible that readership and vandalism life are
correlated, that more widely read articles tend to get reverted
faster? That doesn't sound unreasonable to me and if it's true it
means that readers are exposed to far less vandalism than a uniform
model would suggest.
In any case— I don't say any of this to criticize the mechanics of
your work. I'm able to point these things out because you were clear
about what you measured, more so than some other analysis has been
(including my own, at times). But I do think that it's important that
we are careful to not describe our work in ways that will cause laymen
to over-generalize and that we keep in mind that the most readers are
not researchers, and that they desperately want the kind of pat
open-and-shut answers that we won't be able to even begin providing
until the study of Wikipedia is far better understood.
Likewise, users of Wikipedia research should be forewarned that
researchers are apt to use simple words like "vandalism" when they are
really measuring something far more specific and that surprising
correlations between what is actually being measured and the things it
is being measured against may produce misleading conclusions.
Cheers!
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Subject: [Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of
Articles
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Sean Moss-Pultz <sean(a)openmoko.com>, suh(a)parc.com
I am supposed to be taking a wiki-vacation to finish my PhD thesis and
find a job for next year. However, this afternoon I decided to take a
break and consider an interesting question recently suggested to me by
someone else:
When one downloads a dump file, what percentage of the pages are
actually in a vandalized state?
This is equivalent to asking, if one chooses a random page from
Wikipedia right now, what is the probability of receiving a vandalized
revision?
Understanding what fraction of Wikipedia is vandalized at any given
instant is obviously of both practical and public relations interest.
In addition it bears on the motivation for certain development
projects like flagged revisions. So, I decided to generate a rough
estimate.
For the purposes of making an estimate I used the main namespace of
the English Wikipedia and adopted the following operational
approximations: I considered that "vandalism" is that thing which
gets reverted, and that "reverts" are those edits tagged with "revert,
rv, undo, undid, etc." in the edit summary line. Obviously, not all
vandalism is cleanly reverted, and not all reverts are cleanly tagged.
In addition, some things flagged as reverts aren't really addressing
what we would conventionally consider to be vandalism. Such caveats
notwithstanding, I have had some reasonable success with using a
revert heuristic in the past. With the right keywords one can easily
catch the standardized comments created by admin rollback, the undo
function, the revert bots, various editing tools, and commonly used
phrases like "rv", "rvv", etc. It won't be perfect, but it is a quick
way of getting an automated estimate. I would usually expect the
answer I get in this way to be correct within an order of magnitude,
and perhaps within a factor of a few, though it is still just a crude
estimate.
I analyzed the edit history up to the mid-June dump for a sample
29,999 main namespace pages (sampling from everything in main
including redirects). This included 1,333,829 edits, from which I
identified 102,926 episodes of reverted "vandalism". As a further
approximation, I assumed that whenever a revert occurred, it applied
to the immediately preceding edit and any additional consecutive
changes by the same editor (this is how admin rollback operates, but
is not necessarily true of tools like undo).
With those assumptions, I then used the timestamps on my identified
intervals of vandalism to figure out how much time each page had spent
in a vandalized state. Over the entire history of Wikipedia, this
sample of pages was vandalized during 0.28% of its existence. Or,
more relevantly, focusing on just this year vandalism was present
0.21% of the time, which suggests that one should expect 0.21% of
mainspace pages in any recent enwiki dump will be in a vandalized
state (i.e. 1 in 480).
(Note that since redirects represent 55% of the main namespace and are
rarely vandalized, one could argue that 0.37% [1 in 270] would be a
better estimate for the portion of actual articles that are in a
vandalized condition at any given moment.)
I also took a look at the time distribution of vandalism. Not
surprisingly, it has a very long tail. The median time to revert over
the entire history is 6.7 minutes, but the mean time to revert is 18.2
hours, and my sample included one revert going back 45 months (though
examples of such very long lags also imply the page had gone years
without any edits, which would imply an obscure topic that was also
almost never visited). In the recent period these factors becomes 5.2
minutes and 14.4 hours for the median and mean respectively. The
observation that nearly 50% of reverts are occurring in 5 minutes or
less is a testament to the efficient work of recent changes reviewers
and watchlists.
Unfortunately the 5% of vandalism that persists longer than 35 hours
is responsible for 90% of the actual vandalism a visitor is likely to
encounter at random. Hence, as one might guess, it is the vandalism
that slips through and persists the longest that has the largest
practical effect.
It is also worth noting that the prevalence figures for February-May
of this year are slightly lower than at any time since 2006. There is
also a drop in the mean duration of vandalism coupled to a slight
increase in the median duration. However, these effects mostly
disappear if we limit our considerations to only vandalism events
lasting 1 month or shorter. Hence those changes may be in significant
part linked to cut-off biasing from longer-term vandalism events that
have yet to be identified. The ambiguity in the change from earlier
in the year is somewhat surprising as the AbuseFilter was launched in
March and was intended to decrease the burden of vandalism. One might
speculate that the simple vandalism amenable to the AbuseFilter was
already being addressed quickly in nearly all cases and hence its
impact on the persistence of vandalism may already have been fairly
limited.
I've posted some summary data on the wiki at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_statistics
Given the nature of the approximations I made in doing this analysis I
suspect it is more likely that I have somewhat underestimated the
vandalism problem rather than overestimated it, but as I said in the
beginning I'd like to believe I am in the right ballpark. If that's
true, I personally think that having less than 0.5% of Wikipedia be
vandalized at any given instant is actually rather comforting. It's
not a perfect number, but it would suggest that nearly everyone still
gets to see Wikipedia as intended rather than in a vandalized state.
(Though to be fair I didn't try to figure out if the vandalism
occurred in more frequently visited parts or not.)
Unfortunately, that's it for now as I need to get back to my thesis /
job search.
-Robert Rohde
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