Hi Joe,
Yes, total bytes changed would be a relatively easy weighting factor, but
not I suspect a useful one. So many edits are semi automated addition of
large templates, or reversion of previous changes that you would need to do
some complex filtering to identify the "amount of meaningful work". And it
isn't just the individual edit that you need to consider, like most active
editors I have a number of scripts or tools that I have opted into. In one
extreme example, if I use Twinkle to nominate an article for deletion by
AFD, all I have to do is click on a couple of menus and type a one sentence
case for deleting the article and submit. My account then does the
following edits:
1 creates a page for the deletion discussion with various bits of code
including one copy of my deletion rationale.
2 Lists that deletion discussion on the page for that days deletion
discussions.
3 Templates the article with a warning that it is being considered for
deletion, with the rational and several sentences of verbiage.
4 Writes a template to the author's talkpage telling them what I have done,
quotes the rational and explains what they can do about it
Note by Wikipedia standards these are four manual edits each adding a
generous paragraph or more and all generated by the writing of a rationale
that could be shorter than "Not yet played so not yet notable".
For example, I just went to recent changes, by far the biggest edit of that
moment was this
one<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_change_in_Sweden&…=577633136>.
At first glance it look like someone added 1500 bytes of encyclopaedic
text. Then you realise they merely reverted a vandalism of three minutes
earlier.
Then there's the issue that some people will go through an article fixing
an assortment of typos and perhaps also rephrasing the English, that can
be quite a lot of time spent and many changes with little or any total
change in bytes. I'm sure it would be possible to come up with some set of
filters that compensates for most of this. But it won't be simple and it
would always be vulnerable to someone having some new and or undocumented
way of generating text.
On 17 October 2013 12:18, Joe Corneli <holtzermann17(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All edits are far from equal, someone who
manually writes several
paragraphs of
encyclopaedic content is contributing something
far more valuable than
for
example my recategorising 30 images from one
category to another. I'd
go so
far as to say that in that example the one edit
that writes paragraphs of
text involves more work and is of perhaps thirty times the "value" of my
thirty edits. But measured on edit count we would value them the other
way
round.
Wouldn't it be quite easy to weight the edit counts by text added/deleted?
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