[WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 106, Issue 7

[Horologium]

On 5/16/2012 11:04 PM, wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 21:14:12 -0400
> From: Gwern Branwen<gwern0 at gmail.com>
> To: English Wikipedia<wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got
> 	Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAMwO0gyGeZA0j0ksTz3uNjdUH3zBGY3gqHH7KeTynSz82UFVxA at mail.gmail.com>
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>
>
> 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?
>
I just went through 19 random pages (9 of them didn't have any ELs, so I 
didn't count them, and I found three articles in which the last EL was 
not a useful link. One of them was a spam link to a (non-WMF) 
wikiproject, one was a link to a find-a-grave page with a photo of the 
subject (unneeded because we already had a photo of the subject), and 
the third was a link to the presidential library in which a specific 
judge's papers are archived. (That last would be relevant in an article 
about the judge, but not so much for the article about the district 
court for which he was the chief justice for ten years; I actually went 
and added the link to the article on the judge, which didn't have such a 
link.) That looks like a 30% fail rate. We'll see how many of them get 
reverted, but I suspect that it won't be many, because I didn't go 
through and randomly remove ELs, and I edited logged in; for some 
reason, people who have been administrators for four years with over 
18,000 edits tend to get reverted far less than IP editors. (Go figure.)