On 16/01/07, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
G'day folks,
Researchers at IBM's Visual Comnunication Lab have published an interesting paper called "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia" at the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences held recently.
http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/hicss_40/decisionbp/03_04_07.pdf
Very interesting. The most delightful part? We're still apparently at c. three minutes time to revert significant vandalism - this figure was quoted in their earlier study, but there hasn't been one more recent than 2003 to go from until now, and the project has changed a lot since then. A 2005 figure is a lot more comparable to enwp as it stands today, and is a lot more reassuring... I hope we get a third study in a couple of years to see how the results evolve.
It would be interesting to see comparable studies for the other language projects, though as this method relies on manually identifying and characterising text it would need a decent number of native speakers to work on such a thing.