2009/2/21 Ben Kovitz bkovitz@acm.org:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around 2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there by then.)
Is there any data on changes in the percentage of work spent on adding new material vs. undoing damage to existing material? I'm thinking not only of vandalism, but "clueless edits": people posting religious evangelism, pushing pet theories, adding bogus facts to make their country/city/whatever look more significant than it really is, replacing good writing with bad writing, etc.
I've seen pie charts showing what proportion of edits are reverted, reverts and genuine article improvements. I can't remember where, though...
Hypothesis: The more good material there is, the more human effort it takes to keep it from getting degraded. So, nearing the asymptote, most serious Wikipedia editors may end up spending most of their time doing reverts. An unpleasant thought.
That's a very interesting point... FlaggedRevs may help there - if it's turned on for the entire site it would allow for more efficient RC patrol. Even with that, we may eventually hit a point where there is too much vandalism to cope with (at least with FlaggedRevs we would have a very clear metric - the age of the oldest unreviewed edit), at which point we may have to take unpleasant measures (banning anonymous editing is the obvious one - I hope we never get to the point where that is necessary...).