[WikiEN-l] An interesting study on bad edits and their impact

[Gregory Maxwell]

Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Kathering
Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and
Restoring Value in Wikipedia." To appear in Proc. GROUP 2007. 10 pages.

http://www.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf

Abstract: Wikipedia's brilliance and curse is that any user can edit
any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact
of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is
viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article
views, we show that an overwhelming majority of the viewed words were
written by frequent editors and that this majority is increasing.
Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability
of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and
we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make
policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these
findings.