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