Andrew Lih wrote:
Hi all,
Hope to see many of you at Wikimania next week (yes, it's only one week
away).
I want to propose some time is carved out for a BOAF session for wiki
researchers. Seems Friday and Sunday eves are free, or it could be
Thursday before things get started.
Here are some issues I'd love to talk to other folks about, please feel
free to add:
1. Heuristics for recognizing patterns in edit histories. Most pressing
is an algorithm to determine what constitutes an edit war, vandalism or
any other type of "noise" in the system if one's measuring
"substantive"
edits. (This is hard - even the "I'll know it when I see it" method is
problematic, as evidenced by the recent dispute with and departure
of RickK.) Much of the research myself, Jakob Voss, Cathy Ma and others
do depend on analyzing edit histories and drawing conclusions about
article quality. So far, none of the research I've seen has "factored
out" the effect of edit wars and vandalism.
Revert wars and near-revert-wars are probably easier to algorithmically
identify than other types of edit wars. How do we distinguish between
the case of two very active editors working very pleasantly together in
a back and forth session of mutual improvement and reinforcement versus
two very active editors working unpleasantly together in a back and
forth session of mutually reinforcing downward spiral of useless edits?
I think it's pretty hard to do... algorithmically.
As Andrew suggests, we all do this all the time in our own private
evaluations of what is going on. We know that person X is a jerk, and a
problematic editor, and so is person Y, so when we see them going crazy
on an article, we know it is bad news. But if we see Angela and Andrew
Lih both quickly and repeatedly editing an article, we know it is
probably good news.