Also, vandalism had always been a red herring, kind of like the terrorism
that justifies the TSA security theater and NBA surveillance or the Red
Scare. It's a wrong-headed obsession that weakens community.
On Nov 22, 2013 2:06 PM, "Steven Walling" <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:37 AM, WereSpielChequers
<
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Typo correction and vandalism reversion are
certainly both entries to
editing, and it isn't just anti-vandalism where the opportunities have
declined in recent years. Typos are getting harder to find, especially in
stable widely read articles. Yes you can find plenty of typos by checking
new pages and recent changes, but I doubt our 5 edits a month editors
are
going to internal maintenance pages like that. I
suspect they are readers
who fix things they come across. It would be interesting to survey a
sample
of them I suspect we'd find many who are
reading Wikipedia just as much
as
they used to, but if they only edit when they
spot a mistake then of
course
they will now be editing less frequently. And of
course none of that is
actually bad, any more than is the loss of large numbers of vandals who
used to get into the 5 edits a month band for at least the month in which
they did their spree and were blocked..
The difficulty of getting precise measurements of "community health"
makes
it a fascinating topic, and with many known
factors altering edit levels
in
sometimes poorly understood ways we need to be
wary of
oversimplifications.
No-one really knows what would have happened if
the many edit filters
installed in the last four years had instead been coded as anti vandalism
bots, clearly our edit count would now be much higher, but whether it
would
currently be higher or lower than in 2009 when
the edit filters were
introduced is unknown. Nor should we fret that we shifted so much of our
anti-vandalism work from very quick reversion to not accepting edits.
However it isn't sensible to benchmark community health against past
edit
levels, we should really be comparing community
activity against
readership
levels. If we do that there is a disconnect
between our readership which
for years has grown faster than the internet and our community which is
broadly stable. To some extent this can be considered a success for
Vector
and the shift of our default from a skin
optimised for editing to one
optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels we
always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of
Vector. My suspicion is also that the rise of the mobile device,
especially
amongst the young, is turning us from an
interactive medium into more of
a
broadcast one. It is also likely to be
contributing to the greying of the
pedia.
I am trying to list the major known and probable causes of changes of the
fall in the raw editing levels in a page on
wiki<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F
Holy smokes this thread has gotten off topic, but I'll bite. ;)
Making articles that need spelling and grammar fixes easily available to
new editors is precisely what we're doing with GettingStarted, our software
system for introducing newly-registered people to editing. (Docs at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GettingStarted and
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians). We're
currently
getting thousands of new people to make their first typo fix a month on
English Wikipedia, and we're moving to other Wikipedias soon.
In English Wikipedia it's quite easy for us to do so, since there's a large
category of articles needing copyediting. In other Wikipedias, it's not
easy, because there is no such category. If you want to help us help
newbies, the best thing you could do is create a copyediting category on
your Wikipedia and link it to the appropriate Wikidata item
(either Q8235695 or Q9137504).
As a side point: when we examine first-time editors contributions, these
days it's rare to find someone start out by correcting vandalism, probably
because now bots and users of tools like Huggle or Twinkle catch it all so
fast. It's so small a number that when we examine samples of new
contributors in our qualitative research,[1][2] we just put it in the Other
category of edit types.
Steven
1.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/Qualita…
2.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/OB6/Con…
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>