On 11/22/05, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 22, 2005, at 10:59 AM, geni wrote:
It doesn't matter how alert you are. At certain times (ok pretty much anytime except sunday morning) RC patrol is all about speed. Those ten minutes you spent reseaching were ten minuites which could have been spent keeping out vandalism.
I would rather let vandalism accidentally survive for ten extra minutes than delete good content.
-Phil
Ok lets have a look at how RC patrol really works. Assume that you are not useing any bots because I don't you go to the page and load up a load of recent changes in tabs. Assuming you have it set to hide loged in users that means that at this time of day you can load up about a miniutes worth.
That lot takes me about 4 minutes to process which means we probably need about 5 admins on RC patrol to catch most stuff at this time of day. I caught two bit of vandalism when I just did this.
Now lets look at what happens if we through a vandlilised article into the system. Hopefuly it will get caught but suppose 3 of our 5 admins are off doing research and it gets through. If it survives more than say two minutes then RC patrol is not going to see it. So how long does it last then? Well it depends. Our next line of defence is watchlists. A while back I had an article on my watchlist that was getting vandalised once a day at a pretty regular time. It was probably on a few people's watchlists and the vandalism normaly lasted about an hour (latter it got less beacuse I knew when to expect it). For the watchlist system to pick stuff up we are probably talking hours not 10 minutes. But what if it isn't on the watchlist of any regular editor (hardly unlikely my watchlist is only has 1.5K items on it)? Well then we are relying on someone stubling apon it. This can take days. I know cases where it took months. The increaseing size of wikipedia only makes things worse in this respect.
So all in all your ten minutes analysis is completely flawed.
-- geni