There were a number of flaws in this experiment that IMHO reduce its value.
Firstly rather than measure vandalism it created vandalism, and vandalism that didn't look like typical vandalism. Aside from the ethical issue involved, this will have skewed the result. In particular the edit summaries were very atypical for vandalism, if I'd seen that edit summary on my watchlist I would probably have just sighed and taken it as another example of deletionism in action. Of the more than 13,000 pages on my watchlist I doubt there are 13 where I would look at such an edit, and that's if it was one of the changes on my watchlist that I was even aware of - it is far too big to fully check every day. Most IP vandals don't use jargon in edit summaries, and I know I'm not the only editor who is more suspicious of IP edits with blank edit summaries.
You only ran the experiment for one month. I often revert older vandalism than that, I may be unusual there in that I've got some tools for finding vandalism that has got past the hugglers, but I'm not unusual in sometimes taking articles back to the "last clean version". I'm also aware that we have a large number of editors who we don't see every month - probably the fastest growing part of the community. For example we have 543 admins who have edited in the last three months but have fewer than thirty edits in the last two months, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrators/Semi-activeMan... of these will be among the editors who visit occasionally to keep an eye on some articles that they care about.
If someone wants to work out how good we are at clearing up vandalism then I would suggest a more accurate way would be to:
1. Take a random set of edits from 12 months ago. 2. Check all of them, including the deleted ones, and classify them as vandalism or not 3. Measure how long they persisted in the article 4. Revert any vandalism still extant.
Of course that won't pick up those pre-empted by the edit filter, but if the sample was sufficiently large and random it would give us a measure of the effectiveness of our anti-vandalism work.
Regards
WSC
On 30 May 2012 23:02, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.comwrote:
On 30 May 2012 20:41, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
My view is that if such experiments are to be carried out, it would be better if they were designed and conducted by those able to restrain themselves from such snark.
Better how?
I'll add this to my list of "If you have to ask, you may never know" topics.
Charles
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