[Wikimedia-l] Has the underlying level of edits risen or fallen since the Edit Filters came in in 2009?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

WereSpielChequers, 28/08/2013 17:14:
> Just because the edit filter is enabled by default doesn't mean that
> every wiki has people optimising it to find vandalism in their language.

This is what the bugzilla link is about. :)

>
> I'm trying to work out what the underlying "real" level of editing has
> been since 2009.

For what purposes? The following sentence seems to be about something else:

> The problem with measuring either unreverted edits or
> edits by active users is that the edit filters don't just lose us a
> large proportion of the vandalism that we used to get, they also lose us
> a lot of goodfaith edits that have ceased to be necessary, including the
> vandalism reversions,  warnings and block messages that have been
> automated away by the edit filter.
>
> The stats at
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm get round part
> of that by only measuring mainspace edits, so they don't count the
> warnings and block messages that we've lost. Though they presumably have
> lost the reversion of vandalism that has now been prevented by the edit
> filter.

That's fine if we're interested in the editing activity considered as a 
good thing (rather than in "how much time is wasted doing X").

> But measuring article space edits has its own problems - the
> more article creation has shifted to sandboxes in userspace  and
> especially to on EN wiki to  WP space as part of Articles for creation,
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation> the
> less meaningful it is to measure the different spaces as if their
> boundaries were immutable.

I don't understand. If a page is created in a namespace and moved to 
ns0, its whole history is counted. If history is not moved, or even 
worse it is not moved AND the creator is not the author of the content, 
something stinks. But why would people be doing something which is both 
wrong and more difficult?

>
> I appreciate that some of these things are difficult to measure, but
> sometimes it is the difficult  stuff that is important.

Yes but if it's important you need to define your goals or you'll never 
go anywhere.

> A case in point
> being the increasing  tendency to revert unsourced edits on EN Wiki. The
> stats you quote treat all reversions the same, so the rise in simply
> reverting unsourced edits would appear to be more than masked by a
> combination of  the loss of vandalism reversions to the edit filter, and
> the inreasing speed and sophistication of the vandalfighting bots.

Again, I have no idea how this relates to all the above. Is measuring 
this specific thing your actual goal? You will never be able to see it 
in aggregated stats about editing activity, whatever filter or 
definition you use.

Nemo