[WikiEN-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles

[Steve Bennett]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Robert Rohde<rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

If by "random" you actually mean stochastic (like, clicking "random
page"), then yes. But if you just mean what a visitor is likely to
encounter, then it's skewed by the fact that these are infrequently
visited pages, no? That is, vandalism that lasts longer than 35 hours
is likely to be on a low profile, low traffic page, and thus is less
likely to be encountered. Though of course if it stays there long
enough, the total number of page views will eventually exceed that of
a short-lived vandalism on a high traffic page.

> 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

For me personally, that's higher than I expected. Every 200th page has
vandalism on it? I was hoping for a figure more like 1000.

> Unfortunately, that's it for now as I need to get back to my thesis /
> job search.

We've all been there. :)

Steve