On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/8/21 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/8/20 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I wouldn't suggest looking at the edit history at all, just the most
recent
revision as of whatever moment in time is chosen. If vandalism is
found,
then and only then would one look through the edit history to find out
when
it was added.
That only works if the article is very well referenced and you have all the references and are willing to fact-check everything. Otherwise you will miss subtle vandalism like changing the date of birth by a year.
No need for the article to be referenced at all, but yes, it would be
time
consuming, or at least person-time consuming.
You mean you could go and find references for the information yourself? I suppose you could, but that is completely impractical.
My God. If a few dozen people couldn't easily determine to a relatively high degree of certainty what portion of a mere 0.03% of Wikipedia's articles are *vandalized*, how useless is Wikipedia?
On the other hand, it'd
answer the question, in a way that an automated process never could do (assuming I've got my statistical analysis right, anyway: http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html seems to suggest a 99% confidence level for 664 random samples out of 3 million, but I'm not sure what "response distribution" means).
The site looks like it is for surveys made up of yes/no questions, I don't think it is going to apply to this.
"Is this article vandalized?" is a yes/no question...