Hi Isaac,
I am currently reviewing work on spam detection on Wikipedia. West et al.
(2011) <https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2038558.2038574> found that *the
length (in characters) of the revision summary* was one of the features
with the greatest weight in the final classifier.
Best,
On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 11:46 PM Isaac Johnson <isaac(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks all for the feedback! If anyone thinks of more,
by all means send
over.
1. One of the reasons why any suggestion that we
make edit summaries
compulsory is that as long as they are optional, blank edit summaries are a
great way to identify vandals.
This is a pretty interesting point. For further context, I'm asking because
I'm mentoring a researcher who will be looking into edit summary usage and
I wanted to make sure we weren't asking questions that had already been
answered elsewhere. The research is still in the formative stages of
figuring out what additional research might be useful and just having a
better understanding of the distribution of edit types. When I think of
tools / interventions based on what little I know, however, it's mainly
along the lines of what sorts of edit tags (or similar filters) could be
auto-generated to further contextualize edit summaries. Helping editors
quickly match their edit to templated/canned messages is an idea that gets
floated around too but could be counterproductive for the vandalism case as
you point out.
There is a long-standing tool to search them at
https://sigma.toolforge.org/summary.py?name=Stuartyeates&search=re-revi…
In case you're looking for code to reuse.
Thanks! Glad to see this tool exists!
For completeness, it was also pointed out to me that Wattenberg, Viégas,
and Hollenbach's 2007 paper "Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with
Chromograms" makes heavy use of edit summaries and provides some insight
into their usage:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-540-74800-7_23.pdf
Best,
Isaac
On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 3:48 PM Stuart A. Yeates <syeates(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There is a long-standing tool to search them at
https://sigma.toolforge.org/summary.py?name=Stuartyeates&search=re-revi…
In case you're looking for code to reuse.
cheers
stuart
--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 at 05:38, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Isaac,
> I'm not aware of any research on this. But there are a couple of common
> assumptions that you could check as part of any research.
> 1. One of the reasons why any suggestion that we make edit summaries
> compulsory is that as long as they are optional, blank edit
summaries
are a
great way to identify vandals.
2. There is also a certain amount of "sneaky vandalism" denoted by
edits
that get reverted or reverted and the
perpetrators get warned for
vandalism
or blocked as a "vandalism only
account"
3. Though we admins have the technology to blank people's edit
summaries
> it is very rarely used
> Regards
> Jonathan
> On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 at 16:20, Isaac Johnson <isaac(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> > Does anyone know of any research or statistics around edit summary
> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary> usage on
Wikipedia?
All
> I
> could find in a quick scan was some statistics from 2010 (
>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usage_of_edit_summary_on_Wikipedia).
I'm
> > curious if anyone has more updated statistics, or, even better: a
more
> > thorough analysis of how edit summaries
are used by editors -- i.e.
how
>
complete they are, to what degree they represent the "what" vs. the
"why",
> how often they are misleading, etc.
> Best,
> Isaac
> --
> Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia
Foundation
>
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