I think that we need to consider three other factors here. 1 The proportion of reverts that are legit 2 The community's dissonance over unsourced edits. 3 Transparency
In my experience a substantial minority of IP edits are vandalism, but the community is fairly effective at reverting that vandalism. Much of it comes from school IPs with long block logs and a prominent place on the screens of hugglers.
There are inconsistencies and complexities about the reversion of unsourced edits. Complexities in that newbies maybe surprised to discover that an unsourced change to a biography of a living person will get reverted by many editors who would not be as cautious about an edit to an article on a battleship, volcano or Bollywood film. Inconsistencies in that some editors would respond to the addition of an unsourced fact with a citation needed tag, a revert or a subvocalised meh.
But the big difference between the deletion of new articles and the reversion of new edits to existing articles is transparency. People do make mistakes with rollback, huggle and the other vandal reversion tools. But the system is very effective at picking them up, not least because anyone can look at the edit history of live edits. Vandalfighters who make frequent mistakes get told to slowdown and ultimately lose rollback rights. We are far less effective at dealing with errors at speedy deletion.
WereSpielChequers
On 21 March 2011 21:36, Howie Fung hfung@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yes, thanks for sending this along.
I created a fallout chart which helped me understand the relative weights of different paths: http://bit.ly/ggyypQ
I'm also trying to put this in the context of the Editor Trends Research [1] and the Product Whitepaper [2]. These numbers seem to suggest that registered users actually have a relatively small percentage chance of getting their first edit reverted (3.2% = 1,223/38,404). This seems to be pretty consistent with what we're seeing in other revert research (e.g., Zachte's revert trends [3] has registered editors being reverted 4.2% of the time).
While reversion rates for registered editors appears to have grown quite a bit from 2005-2007, the numbers are still relatively small, especially when compared to the reversion rates of anonymous editors. This seems to suggest that important areas for research are:
- Understanding reversion of edits from anonymous users and their
downstream impact on our other metrics (e.g., New Wikipedians) 2) Obtaining a more nuanced understanding of reversions to registered editors (e.g., in addition to understanding the % of edits that get reverted over time, understanding the nature of the reversions and whether they have gotten more contentious over time).
Howie
[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results [2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper [3] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper#Reversion_and_Newbie_T...
On 3/21/11 1:24 PM, Zack Exley wrote:
Thanks for pointing this out. This is very cool stuff. Philippe & James Alexander are working on some related questions. I just asked them to reach out to you and Mr.Z-man. Zack
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:27 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
I've just come across a really important bit of research on EN wiki.
User:Mr.Z-man analyzed the new accounts created in February to see how many were still editing in September.
Key findings:
Over two thirds of new accounts had still not become editors after 6 months.
Editors who start by creating articles are only about a quarter of new editors, three quarters edit existing articles. I find this credible if a little on the low side. But over ten thousand newbies created an article in February 2010, had their article deleted and ceased editing.
Editors whose articles are not deleted are over seven times more likely to remain than editors whose articles were deleted.
As one would expect, the retention rate of Article creators was much lower than of other new editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mr.Z-man/newusers
WereSpielChequers
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