Andrew Lih wrote:
But I'd like to offer another interpretation -
there is no confidence
these suspicious edits will be found or caught later. And that can bug
certain types of people. Of all the mechanisms Wikipedia has for
tracking changes and edits, perhaps the weakest is how to allow new
entires to linger for a specified period and grow, and then come back
to evaluate later. For many, "check it later" means "check it never."
I think this is definitely true, and not just because people misperceive
that they have to act now. Things get caught on recent changes and new
articles, but if they don't get caught there, they often essentially
never get caught. When using the "random pages" feature (as I do quite
a bit), I've run into complete junk, sometimes outright vandalism (like
"bob is gay") that has been there since _2002_.
Cleanup is supposed to address some of this problem, but I'm not
qualified to say whether it's worked or not.
-Mark