On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 11 February 2010 17:17, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
b) Use reversions. Sample a thousand uses of rollback from the recent changes list, find time between that edit and the one it was reverting.
That one sounds easier. If only people wouldn't use rollback inappropriately...
Looking for rollback edits is a good way to find vandalism that was reverted quickly, but as Andrew says it won't find old vandalism on articles with subsequent edits, which is essential if the intention it to find out how much vandalism takes a long time to be reverted.
And such are very common. In high-vandalism pages, it's easy for entire sections to just drop out in the back and forth. Bot edits badly exacerbate the issue because they edit whenever the heck they feel like it, and increase the noise in diffs.
An example: while looking at a reversion of a few anon edits on [[Legalism (Chinese philosophy)]], I grew suspicious of the ordering of sections - it seemed a little off, a little too choppy. I looked at consolidated diffs back to January, finding nothing in particular, but it was only when I gave it a last try all the way back to December, that I figured it out: 2 entire substantial sections had gotten deleted.
I had to manually copy them back in because of all the bot activity in the interim: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Legalism_%28Chin...