Dear Isaac,
I'm not aware of any research on this. But there are a couple of common
assumptions that you could check as part of any research.
1. One of the reasons why any suggestion that we make edit summaries
compulsory is that as long as they are optional, blank edit summaries are a
great way to identify vandals.
2. There is also a certain amount of "sneaky vandalism" denoted by edits
that get reverted or reverted and the perpetrators get warned for vandalism
or blocked as a "vandalism only account"
3. Though we admins have the technology to blank people's edit summaries
it is very rarely used
Regards
Jonathan
On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 at 16:20, Isaac Johnson <isaac(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Does anyone know of any research or statistics around
edit summary
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary> usage on Wikipedia? All
I
could find in a quick scan was some statistics from 2010 (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usage_of_edit_summary_on_Wikipedia). I'm
curious if anyone has more updated statistics, or, even better: a more
thorough analysis of how edit summaries are used by editors -- i.e. how
complete they are, to what degree they represent the "what" vs. the
"why",
how often they are misleading, etc.
Best,
Isaac
--
Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
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