2009/2/21 Ben Kovitz <bkovitz(a)acm.org>rg>:
On Mon, Feb
16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)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...).