On 28 February 2010 14:31, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, I came across this in my reader.. I think it is of general interest.. Thanks,     GerardM

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/28/1946216/Developing-a-Vandalism-Detec...

While I, of course, appreciate anyone wanting to help deal with vandalism, it seems the person responsible for this underestimates the efficacy of our existing methods (automated, semi-automated and manual). This paper by the same person (he links to it in a slashdot comment):

http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/publications/downloads/papers/stein_20...

is rather interesting. It contains some good statistics. He is of the opinion, however, that we should prefer what he called "high-recall" (few false negatives) over "high-precision" (few false positives) since it avoids readers seeing vandalised versions. I disagree, since he hasn't taken into account how annoying it is for editors to be reverted by a bot and the harm caused by losing those editors. FlaggedRevs (which I remain ever optimistic about!) will provide a much better solution.