Joseph Reagle wrote:
Given all the bots, both in terms of vandals and in
repulsing them, I
am not sure the following question even makes sense: but how can we
characterize the ratio of productive to unproductive
contribution/edits on the English Wikipedia? Has this changed over
time? I do have figures from the literature on percentages (and their
deltas) for administrator activity, policy edits, time to revert
vandalism, etc. The only data point I can find is a single one: the
"Bush article had 28,000 revisions, one-third were reverts and,
conceivably, another third vandalism" (Spinellis, Louridas 2008).
There are some things touching on this in my recent WikiSym paper[1]
that you may wish to consider. Specifically, we define a metric for
measuring discarded work that is a bit more subtle than just reverts,
cast in terms of whether or not the community of editors around an
article has "accepted" a revision (and a revert itself can be accepted).
While not the primary result, we include charts of the proportion of
revisions which are accepted. The metric should be applicable for a
more rigorous study of unproductive vs. productive work.
- Michael
1.
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/procfiles/p104-ekstrand.pdf
--
Michael Ekstrand <ekstrand(a)cs.umn.edu>
Ph.D student, Computer Science -- University of Minnesota
GroupLens Research:
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