On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/2 Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com:
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I agree, that's definitely the most important statistic. A more useful statistic would be the age of the oldest unreviewed revision.
17.8 days http://toolserver.org/~aka/cgi-bin/reviewcnt.cgi?lang=english&action=out...
Ask, and you shall receive! Thank you!
So that's 10570 articles that have been waiting over a day (out of 12667 articles with out of date reviews). That's pretty bad... I would have expected a long tail type distribution. Any ideas why there are so many very out-of-date article compared to slightly out-of-date ones?
Might it be because they were looked at several times and each time people went "um, not sure about this" and left it for someone else to do? Flagged revisions is serious because the impression is that you are verifying people's work to some standard. Now if someone quote an obscure source, but you don't have or haven't heard of that source, what do you do? Trust the editor? Let it go through anyway? Let someone else deal with it and see a backlog build up?
What I'd like to see is a feature where you can click "not sure" and bump the review up several levels of expertise, so the difficult stuff gets naturally filtered to those with the expertise. Say, subject matter or foreign language, or obscure book. Depending on how flexible such a system is, it might make flagging revisions more efficient, not less.
Training people to do rudimentary and moderate and advanced reviews would be next.
Extremely dififcult to scale and harness the right levels of expertise (from typo-spotting upwards), but very rewarding if done right. One problem is edits that combine different sorts of things, and the "massive chunks of text added in one go".
I presume the current system is a rudimentary one only designed to catch obvious vandalism? If that is the case, people need to be more alert than before (not less) to subtle vandalism and good-faith misrepresentation of sources by poor or skewed writing.
Carcharoth