+1 WSC. When I thought about replicating it, I expected to see a dramatic
decline in the impact of vandalism with the advent of counter-vandalism
tools and abuse filter.
It would be interesting to see that on a cross-wiki basis as different
wikis employ different strategies (or seemingly none at all) for
counter-vandalism over time.
On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 10:58 AM WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Aaron,
That was an interesting read and a bit of a time capsule. 2002-2006 is a
bit before I started editing Wikipedia. Before many of the tools such as
huggle that give vandalfighters such an advantage over vandals, I think
before the era of bot reversion of vandalism when vandalism had to be
reverted by humans rather than computers, and certainly before the edit
filters that prevent much, possibly most vandalism from even being saved.
It also seems to predate the whole panoply of page protection that stops
vandals even editing many common vandalism targets (they do say that every
single article is available for anyone to edit).
It would be interesting to see a study now when recent changes patrollers
boast of the times they have got to some vandalism faster than Cluebot.
I know there were predictions in the early years that eventually the tidal
wave of vandalism would overwhelm the defenders of the wiki, that study
seems to have been part of that. I wonder if anyone in 2004 predicted that
we would get to the current situation where adolescent vandalism has turned
out to be so predictable that dealing with it has been mostly automated and
now we are more worried about spam than vandalism.
WSC
On Mon, 18 Jan 2021 at 23:52, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
See page 7 of Priedhorsky, R., Chen, J., Lam, S.
T. K., Panciera, K.,
Terveen, L., & Riedl, J. (2007, November). Creating, destroying, and
restoring value in Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2007 international
ACM
conference on Supporting group work* (pp.
259-268).
http://reidster.net/pubs/group282-priedhorsky.pdf
They discuss the probability of a page view of Wikipedia containing
vandalism rising over time. I wanted to replicate this analysis and
extend
it past 2007 but I never got the chance. I think
the methodology is
really
interesting though.
It doesn't directly answer the question but it does get at the *impact*
of
vandalism.
On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 12:13 PM Isaac Johnson <isaac(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
To WSC's point about the difficulty of
detecting such behavior or
surveying
> at a point in which it would still be salient, I'd add that in general
we
> have a large gap in our knowledge about why
people choose to stop
editing
> because almost all of our survey mechanisms
depend on existing
logged-in
> usage of the wikis. This is a challenge with
many other websites too
but
it's
generally easier to find and survey who, for instance, has left
Facebook (example
<
http://socialmedia.soc.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CHI2013-…
> >)
> by collecting a random sample of people than it is to find and survey
> someone who was a former editor of Wikipedia. There were surveys that
did
ask about
major barriers to editing (which presumably contribute to
burnout) such as the 2012 survey:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Editor_Survey_2012_-_Wi…
(see the
editor survey category
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editor_surveys> if you're
looking
for others)
Some things that come to mind though:
- I suspect very few readers see vandalism in their daily browsing
(as a
> very frequent, long-term reader of English Wikipedia, I have trouble
> recalling encountering any clear vandalism in the course of normal
> reading). That said, I do suspect that most people have seen plenty
of
stories of outlandish vandalism to Wikipedia -- some legitimate but
many
> more about vandalism that literally lasted minutes -- that may lead
to
lower
trust. Whether or not lower trust in Wikipedia leads to lower
readership is a separate question though. Jonathan Morgan ran some
recent
surveys on reader trust and what factors affected it that might be
relevant:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_role_of_citations_in_how_reade…
-
Specifically in the context of harassment and gender equity:
- Harassment as barrier:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_equity_report_2018/Barriers_to_equity
> - Edit summaries in particular as
harassment:
>
https://www.elizabethwhittaker.net/wmf-internship (more details
> <
>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#July_2019>
> )
> - Annual Community Insights Reports often have a section on this
--
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Insights/Community_Insights_2020_…
-
2015 Harassment Survey:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Harassment_survey_2015
- The body of work around barriers to newcomers might have some good
insights too -- e.g.,
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfaker/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 5:44 AM WereSpielChequers <
> werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Amir,
> >
> > This is one of those areas of research where we really need the
annual
> > editor survey. I think it ran once
after the 2009/10 Strategy
process,
> and
> > I don't know if the best questions got included.
> >
> > But the best time to ask editors what prompted them to start
editing
> has
> > to be fairly soon after they started as memories fade. I once went
back
to
> my early edits and the edit I remembered starting me editing barely
made
it
> into my first 50.
>
> There is a longstanding theory that a lot of new editors start or
started
> to fix some vandalism that they saw, and
that this group went into
steep
decline a
decade ago with the rise of Cluebot and other antivandalism
tools
> that work faster than a newbie could. But without an annual survey to
ask
> editors what prompted them to edit you are
going to struggle to
research
> this. Of course you could look at the early
logged in edits of
> active/prolific wikipedians, but if it is true that many/most
Wikipedians
> > start with some IP edits, the earliest edits of many Wikipedians
won't
be
> available.
>
> Abuse one assumes has a differential effect on the targets of abuse,
> disproportionately women, gays and ethnic minorities. But I'd be
inclined
> > to look at stuff targeted at their user and usertalkpages rather than
> > talkpages and edit summaries, though an email survey of former
editors
> > would be useful.
> >
> > My suspicion is that when we revert, block and maybe even revdel or
> > oversight abuse we assume that fixes the problem, and if we want to
> tackle
> > abuse we need more edit filters to prevent such abuse from going
live.
> >
> > WSC
> >
> > On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 15:16, Amir E. Aharoni <
> > amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Is there any research about the effect of vandalism in wiki content
> pages
> > > on readers, experienced editors, and new and potential editors?
> > >
> > > And of abuse in discussion pages and edit summaries on experienced
> > editors
> > > and new and potential editors?
> > >
> > > Intuitively and anecdotally one could think of the following:
> > > 1. Vandalism in content pages (articles) wastes editors' and
> patrollers'
> > > time. This (probably) doesn't require proof (or does it?). But some
> > people
> > > say it also causes some experienced editors to burn out and leave.
Is
> > there
> > > any data about it, beyond intuition?
> > >
> > > 2. Does vandalism *measurably* affect the perception of the wikis'
> > > reliability? (This may be wildly different in different languages
and
> > > wikis.)
> > >
> > > 3. Abusive language on discussion pages and edit summaries affects
> > editors,
> > > and may cause them to reduce their editing, to stop editing about
> certain
> > > topics, or to leave the wiki entirely. Is this effect measurable?
How
> > does
> > > it differ for various groups by gender, age, religion, country,
> > > professional and educational background, seniority at the wiki,
etc.?
> > >
> > > Thanks! :)
> > >
> > > --
> > > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> > >
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> > > “We're living in pieces,
> > > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > >
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> >
>
>
> --
> Isaac Johnson (he/him/his) -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia
Foundation
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