To answer your point about "basic categorisation
of the nature of edits" I
have two words for you: Revision Scoring
As Adam Wight pointed out at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Revision_scoring_as_a_serviceā¦
the Mediawiki system doesn't allow the editor to categorize their
reason for reverting, so currently revision scoring as a service will
not actually categorize the nature of what it is learning.
Supervised learning tasks have the ability to include such categories,
and although something derived from the ontology at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_summary_legend
will be selectable, probably from radio buttons or a pull-down menu,
during the
http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
pilot, there will still be an "other" catch-all option.