Hi folks,
thank you so much for your messages and a very interesting discussion.
Special thanks to Finn for all the hints.
In my opinion results acquired by Priedhorsky's team don't falsify
Swartz's hypothesis at all. Cases analyzed by Swartz showed that even
when a user contributed with a large amount of text, it could be a
translation or a paste-and-copy of a text found somewhere in the
Internet. Swartz remarks that this kind of content was typical for
active users --- editcountitis, as Kerry wrote. This phenomenon makes
impossible, or very difficult, to measure a valuable user contribution
with a software. If you want to exclude translation or plagiarism, we
must engage a human, or try to created quite sophisticated algorithm.
As far as I remember Priedhorsky's method counts translations and
plagiarism as a valuable content.
Best,
Krzysztof
PS. BTW anybody measured how much of Wikipedia text was
copied-and-pasted from another sites, i. e. plagiarized?
On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 10:57 AM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Kerry,
Though the vast majority of my edits are precisely the sort of minor
housekeeping edits that you describe, I agree with almost all that you say.
But would make three little observations.
1 the solution to the edit conflict problem is to fix the software so we
have fewer edit conflicts. It wouldn't be a big change to have the software
treat categories and project tags as their own sections and not reject
newbies edits as conflicts with the taggers and the categorisers. When you
are training newbies you can minimise these problems by getting them to
start articles in sandboxes and to create sections. But the solution is to
get a high priority for various low priority and won't fix bugs on
phabricator that would reduce edit conflicts. For the research community the
big opportunity is to do research on edit conflicts, if the research showed
that they are as I believe the biggest biter of good faith newbies then
there is a good chance that some programming resource could be allocated to
them. If the research showed that they are not significant and that projects
like AFT, Visual Editor, liquid threads, flow and the media wiki viewer
really were a better investment for the WMF than reducing edit conflicts,
then I will be astonished, and the WMF somewhat vindicated.
2 don't take the "editors have been in decline since 2006/7" too
seriously.
These are raw figures on edits, they don't take account of the edit filters
which during that era lost us most of our vandalism and with it the vandal
reversion, vandal warnings, aiv reports and block messages that were
generated in response. Nor do they allow for the migration to wikidata of
things like intrawiki links. The truth is I'm pretty sure no-one has
meaningful figures for community size in that era.
3 project tagging even for currently dormant projects shouldn't cause edit
conflicts on articles as the tags go on talk pages. Whether project tagging
has use or not depends on your attitude about the health of the community.
If we are experiencing uniform and irreversible decline with a dwindling
band of editors who aren't changing their editing interests and no new
recruits then I could see the argument that once a wiki project has become
moribund it won't revive. If however we are broadly stable but with a steady
in flow of new editors, then I would see dormant wiki projects as an
opportunity for newish editors to take on a role within the community.
Again, somebody could earn a doctorate studying this.
Regards
Jonathan
On 23 Jun 2015, at 22:44, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Given what we that active editors have been declining since about 2006, I
have to wonder if a 2015 study would produce very different results from the
earlier period.
From an entirely anecdotal perspective, I do observe that there is a lot of
“housekeeping” edits that go on. I create a lot of new articles and would
characterise my own editing as writing a lot of new content in new and
existing articles; this is my primary interest. However, I am both amused
and annoyed at the way that within moments of my edit, there can be a rash
of people wanting to add project tags, add esoteric categories that I cannot
imagine being used for navigation by real readers, replace a dash of one
length with a dash of another length, remove the word “comprised” (one of
the most annoying!), and so on. Many of these folks have massive edit counts
and appear (from a quick look at the last screen of recent contributions) to
devote themselves entirely to this kind of editing. Indeed, I go so far as
to say many suffer from editcountitis, a condition that often can be
diagnosed by the User page being largely devoted to reporting on their
number of edits J
IMHO, I would have to say that the value-add of these housekeeping edits is
mixed. Some are genuinely useful (people pick up mistakes I’ve made) or add
categories I am unaware of that are relevant to the topic. Some are useful
if you happen to believe the reader experience is genuinely improved by
rigid adherence the Manual of Style (I would be interested in a study on how
important the consistency of the use of various-length dashes and other MoS
detail is to the reader experience). Some like project tagging appear to be
utterly pointless as most of the projects involved are moribund. Other than
meeting some deep need to “mark your territory” like a dog (or get your edit
count up), what earthly point is there to project tagging unless the project
has some active processes to improve articles? Some are just annoying (like
the user who dislikes the word “comprised”) and many of these people create
edit conflicts for me as I add further content which is ****ing annoying.
Edit conflicts is a particular problem trying to do your second/third edit
to a new article, as new articles attract housekeeping edits like vultures
to a carcass. The folks I particularly despise are the ones who try to add
multiple quality tags or speedy delete a new stub after its first edit
(which is sometimes cut short because I am interrupted – folks, give me 5
minutes please to come back and do a little more work on it).
I teach Wikipedia editing (indeed I am off to a local university to do it
this morning) and I see first hand how this kind of housekeeping behaviour
is really disruptive to new contributors (even the more useful and
well-intended housekeeping) because of the edit conflicts it creates. New
contributors spend a long time writing and previewing before SAVE, which is
probably a desirable behaviour if it wasn’t for the housekeepers. Whereas
anyone who studied my patterns of edits would see me saving very frequently,
because of this issue with edit conflicts from the housekeepers. I try to
teach people to SAVE, SAVE, SAVE as often as possible. Having seen the
impact of edit conflicts in edit training sessions where I am there to
explain what’s happening, I suspect that housekeeping edits are probably
frightening off or frustrating away new contributors who don’t have someone
leaning over their shoulder to advise them on dealing with edit conflicts.
Because it is quick and easy to do a housekeeping edit and slow to write
good content with citations, the housekeepers can easily drive away a
content contributor.
Kerry
________________________________
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan
Morgan
Sent: Wednesday, 24 June 2015 3:24 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Aaron Swartz Hypothesis on
WikipediaAuthorship
On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Finn Årup Nielsen <fn(a)imm.dtu.dk> wrote:
One interesting original study is this one: "Creating, Destroying, and
Restoring Value in Wikipedia" from 2007 by
Reid Priedhorsky and others.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1316624.1316663
Yes, this is the best study of which I'm aware.
- J
best regards
Finn Årup Nielsen
On 06/23/2015 04:46 PM, Krzysztof Gajewski wrote:
Hi all,
I wonder if you know if somebody verified and / or further researched
Aaron Swartz's thesis on structure of Wikipedia participation. You can
find it here:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Best,
Krzysztof Gajewski
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