On 31 December 2014 at 11:52, Carol Moore dc <carolmooredc@verizon.net> wrote:

The below definitely are interesting issues which deserve their own thread. I kept reading the proposals but had not run into the implementation very often.
On 12/30/2014 3:24 PM, Risker wrote:

Keep in mind that the majority of Wikimedians (i.e., people making edits on the 900+ sites hosted by the WMF) do so without registering an account. The existence of these projects was entirely dependent on that fact in the early days (and in younger and smaller projects, still is). I recall seeing data indicating that over 90% of Wikimedians made their first edits without creating an account, and I'll wager the same is true for the majority of people on this list, at least anyone who joined before about 2009. However, as time has progressed, it's become increasingly difficult to get edits accepted from unregistered editors: some projects have flagged revisions for every single edit, for example, which means that an edit by an IP isn't even visible until it's been "approved" - which can sometimes take weeks;

**Wikiprojects themselves can do it? What percentage of projects do it and articles covered?

German Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia and some other projecs have flagged revisions (aka pending changes) on ALL articles, and there are others as well but I don't recall them off the top of my head.

The vast majority of wikiprojects have only a few active members; the most active on enwiki seem to be related to entertainment and US politics. Wikiprojects have no relationship with adding flagged revisions on enwiki: it is a form of page protection and can only be added by administrators based on specific criteria. "Repeated vandalism from unregistered users" is the most common one, followed closely by "repeated unsourced BLP-related/statistical edits by unregistered users". There is a secondary level of flagged revisions that permits only those with "reviewer" level permissions to accept edits; however, it is extremely controversial because it's all-or-nothing (either you have it for any article or you don't have that permission at all) and it is very easy to manipulate articles through this.

others have groups of 'recent changes patrollers' that revert almost all edits by unregistered users ("anti-vandalism patrol") whether or not the content is reasonable or even good.

**I somehow ended up as one on the "devolution" article and dealt with it; what happens when all patrollers for an article stop watching for whatever reason?

The majority of recent changes patrollers work off the recent changes feed, not watchlists.

A while back, I decided to do some minor copy edits without logging in, and was within a whisker of getting blocked for fixing typos - 70% of my edits were reverted, even though 100% of them were correct.

**Which of the above systems did this or usual editing practices from questionable editors?

I suspect this was people working off the recent changes feed. You can select reviewing all edits or only those from unregistered (IP) editors, and quite a few RC patrollers *only* monitor IP edits.

Does this show that WMF is more interested in looking for techno-fixes to the problems of vandalism or crappy editing by inexperienced editors? That projects are being dominated by individuals, possibly for personal reasons or POV reasons?

In fairness here, all of the technologies that have been built to reduce vandalism/crappy editing by inexperienced editors were built at the request of (and often by) members of the editing communities. Most edit filters are written by community members, and the overall management of the edit filters is done by community members; the WMF staff only step in if a filter is having a problematic effect on something core like page load time.

I think it was Wikipediocracy that alleged they are putting most of their $50 million a year into tech. With a little for research, but nothing to support editors.

REAL ENCYCLOPEDIAS do help out their writers. Why not hire a) mentors to help new editors out, including dealing with civility issues, at least showing them where to go or asking uncivil jerks to lay off and b) mediators for more experienced editors having content disputes.

I don't know where you get your data about "REAL ENCYCLOPEDIAS" - or how comparable it would be given the commercial and profit-oriented and expertise-oriented differences between "them" and "us". But I'm not averse to the WMF doing some significant beefing up of the community advocacy department.

Risker/Anne