Collecting reverted edits at user level - Wiki-research-l

14 Apr 2023

Sending this again from my current address. Left Gmail a long time ago -- not sure the
redirect still works... My apologies if this is hitting your inbox twice! 

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Dear Wikimedia research community, 

I'd have a question for the data savvy people on this list :) 

My goal is simple: for a sample of English Wikipedia editors, I'm trying to identify
their edits which were reverted. I can see two possible way of doing this: 

1. Identify the reverts using the SHA1 values. (A revert happens when the edit exactly
restores the page to its previous state.)

2. Identify the reverts using the "undo" button. 

As I see it, solution 2 is less "precise" (you'll miss some reverts, e.g.,
those performed manually). However, it would also be less computationally intensive, and I
don't see that it would introduce any bias (results can be compared across editors in
a statistical model). 

However, I do not see the information about whether a revision was reverted using the
“undo” button in the enwiki database:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Manual:Database_layout/diagram&…

I find this surprising. Am I missing something? (And if so, how do you personally feel
about strategy 1 vs. strategy 2?)

Thank you so much for any insight you might be willing to provide! :D

Sincerely,  

Jérôme