WSC,
Halfaker and Geiger have done some work on an intuitive way of measuring
work/contribution. Instead of edit count, they propose the idea of an edit
session:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Metrics/edit_sessions
I have not seen this widely adopted in research, but I think it is a
compelling idea with more validity than mere edit count. Then again,
*within-user
changes to edit count over time *seems to be a sufficient measuring of
work/contribution in certain research scenarios as well. I guess it all
depends on the question.
Cheers,
Michael
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 7:00 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Wow, thanks for making that. I had thought that the
combination of
shifting vandalfighting to the edit filters and the change of intrawikis
from peer to peer to hub and spoke had reduced the number of bot edits. But
then I find there are bots following me around - when I semi protect an
article a bot follows me and adds the little silver padlock icon on the
page. Which gets me to the more serious point about measuring things by
edit count. All edits are far from equal, someone who manually writes
several paragraphs of encyclopaedic content is contributing something far
more valuable than for example my recategorising 30 images from one
category to another. I'd go so far as to say that in that example the one
edit that writes paragraphs of text involves more work and is of perhaps
thirty times the "value" of my thirty edits. But measured on edit count we
would value them the other way round.
I think that this is such a distortion that it risks skewing our whole
understanding of the project, and I'm wondering if anyone has found another
way to try and measure someone's contributions? In other spheres of human
endeavour you might try and estimate how many hours of work had been
contributed by particular people or groups of people. You could I suspect
get part of the way there by only counting the number of unique calender
hours in which someone had made edits. Some people routinely do hundreds of
manual edits in an hour, and such people would on this measure have
contributed far fewer hours than those whose edits are rarely less than ten
minutes apart. Of course estimating the hours of effort by counting the
number of unique hours in which one has edited would over estimate the
effort of the hypothetical editor who occasionally contributes the odd
couple of minutes, and under estimate the efforts of someone who takes more
than an hour before they actually hit save. But it would probably be much
closer to people's relative donation of time to the project than simply
looking at raw edit count.
On a related note, I'm looking for ways to test the hypothesis that some
of the drop in edit count between our 2007 peak and the introduction of the
edit filters in 2009 was simply due to bots reverting vandals faster, and
getting individual vandals through the warning levels and blocked quicker
and for fewer total edits than would have happened in manual
vandalfighting. Can anyone suggest ways to test that hypothesis or measure
its effect?
Regards
Jonathan
On 14 October 2013 17:40, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
Very cool. If you include wikidata then more than
50% of the edits on the
Wikimedia projects are made by bots. One of the dead horses I like to beat
is that bot editors should be treated as first class citizens of Wikipedia
and this data nicely illustrates that. I think this is a bigger watershed
moment (we might have reached this threshold a while back) then mobile vs
non-mobile and we should have a way more rigorous discussion about the
future of bots on Wikipedia. Particularly as all our big features are aimed
at human editors :)
D
On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Dario Taraborelli <
dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
A new app by Thomas Steiner (@tomayac) counting
bot vs human edits in
real time from the RecentChanges feed:
http://wikipedia-edits.herokuapp.com/
(read more [2]). The application comes with a public API exposing
Wikipedia and Wikidata edits as Server-Sent Events. [1]
Dario
[1]
http://blog.tomayac.com/index.php?date=2013-10-14&time=16:49:46&per…
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-sent_events
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Michael Restivo
Department of Sociology
Social and Behavioral Sciences Building S-433
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794
marestivo(a)gmail.com