Hi Nemo,
Good questions:
I'm trying to work out what the underlying "real" level of editing has
been since 2009, not because I think it a good metric, I'm aware that edit
count is only a good measure of edit count. But because others are getting
concerned about a drop in edit count, and I'd like to try to come up with a
less bad metric than raw edit count.
As for your critique of the Article For Creation process " I don't
understand. If a page is created in a namespace and moved to ns0, its whole
history is counted. If history is not moved, or even worse it is not moved
AND the creator is not the author of the content, something stinks. But why
would people be doing something which is both wrong and more difficult?"
I'm not a fan of that process either, but I'm aware that it does happen on
EN wiki, and that it is steering many edits away from mainspace.
Regards
Jonathan
On 28 August 2013 16:45, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
WereSpielChequers, 28/08/2013 17:14:
Just because the edit filter is enabled by default doesn't mean that
every wiki has people optimising it to find
vandalism in their language.
This is what the bugzilla link is about. :)
I'm trying to work out what the underlying
"real" level of editing has
been since 2009.
For what purposes? The following sentence seems to be about something else:
The problem with measuring either unreverted edits or
edits by active users is that the edit filters
don't just lose us a
large proportion of the vandalism that we used to get, they also lose us
a lot of goodfaith edits that have ceased to be necessary, including the
vandalism reversions, warnings and block messages that have been
automated away by the edit filter.
The stats at
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm<http://stats.…
round part
of that by only measuring mainspace edits, so they don't count the
warnings and block messages that we've lost. Though they presumably have
lost the reversion of vandalism that has now been prevented by the edit
filter.
That's fine if we're interested in the editing activity considered as a
good thing (rather than in "how much time is wasted doing X").
But measuring article space edits has its own problems - the
more article creation has shifted to sandboxes in
userspace and
especially to on EN wiki to WP space as part of Articles for creation,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/**wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_**
Articles_for_creation<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjec…
the
less meaningful it is to measure the different spaces as if their
boundaries were immutable.
I don't understand. If a page is created in a namespace and moved to ns0,
its whole history is counted. If history is not moved, or even worse it is
not moved AND the creator is not the author of the content, something
stinks. But why would people be doing something which is both wrong and
more difficult?
I appreciate that some of these things are
difficult to measure, but
sometimes it is the difficult stuff that is important.
Yes but if it's important you need to define your goals or you'll never go
anywhere.
A case in point
being the increasing tendency to revert
unsourced edits on EN Wiki. The
stats you quote treat all reversions the same, so the rise in simply
reverting unsourced edits would appear to be more than masked by a
combination of the loss of vandalism reversions to the edit filter, and
the inreasing speed and sophistication of the vandalfighting bots.
Again, I have no idea how this relates to all the above. Is measuring this
specific thing your actual goal? You will never be able to see it in
aggregated stats about editing activity, whatever filter or definition you
use.
Nemo