[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 8:47 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> The number of
> editors is fairly static, although there were about 25% more people
> volunteering in 2006 when there were lots of new things to write about.

Staticness is a serious problem: the world is not staying still. We
can't keep up with a growing world with a editor base that is static
in absolute terms. Productivity improvements like
anti-obvious-vandalism bots offer limited gains which can keep our
heads over the rising water, temporarily, but they don't change the
bigger picture.

As I demonstrated earlier with my external link experiment, editors
are not keeping up with even the clearest, best intentioned, highest
quality suggestions. How can you hope that this means that more
sophisticated and difficult tasks like anti-troll, vandalism, hoax,
etc. are still being performed to past standards?

Incidentally, I have been finishing an experiment involving the
removal of 100 random external links by an IP; I haven't analyzed it
yet, so I don't know the outcome, but this gives us an opportunity!

Would anyone in this thread (especially the ones convinced Wikipedia's
editing community is in fine shape) care to predict what percentage or
percentage range they expect will have been reverted?

Or what percentage/percentage range they would regard as an acceptable
failure-to-revert rate?

-- 
gwern