[Foundation-l] Semi-protection on April Fools

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 3/29/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> For someone who values empirical data, you are very quick to reject a
> hypothesis using very little data. I suspect that this is because you
> are predisposed towards a particular conclusion. Furthermore, that
> there will be an increase in vandalism is not the only relevant
> hypothesis.

I do not reject the idea that April fools causes some vandalism.
I reject the hypothesis that the vandalism is to such an enormous
extent that it would necessitate a dramatic change in operations.

I did not fail to consider the below points,

> We need to consider many different factors:
> 1) What types of vandalism are there? A simple page blanking is very
> different from a subtle alteration of facts. Double edit vandalism
> (two vandal edits in a row) is harder to detect than single edit
> vandalism. And so forth.
> 2) Accordingly, what is the persistency of the vandalism on April
> Fools vs. the persistency of vandalism on other days of the year?
> 3) How much vandalism is committed by regular users? How much by
> anonymous users? What is the availability of regular users and
> administrators to fix vandalism?
> 4) What is the situation in other projects/languages than en.wp? How
> about WM wikis with small communities that aren't used to dealing with
> vandalism?
> 5) How will the rate of vandalism this year be impacted by the
> Seigenthaler incident and other media coverage about vandalism in
> Wikipedia?

But I can not accept their relevance. The bulk editing patterns for
April 1/2 last year both in terms of total edits and obviously
reverted edits were well within the normal deviation at the time.

I have no doubt that there will be specific articles which see a
somewhat elevated level of vandalism, but I can't support the notion
that we should change sitewide policy on the basis of events which
were not numerous enough to impact the project wide statistics.


> I also remember excellent examples were discussed last year of serious
> vandalism that was particular to April Fools and that was a lot of
> work to clean up after. But, unless there is a clear sign from above
> that a fast and radical decision is likely given enough convincing
> reasons, I am skeptical as to whether it makes sense to dig up these
> threads, and to expand upon the above points. We will all find out in
> 3 days. You should be happy - more data for you to chew on.

Where are these examples?  If there were such examples which are so
much worse than our typical vandalism I would expect someone to
produce links pretty much off the top of their head...

Without hard data human perception and memory are poor analysis
devices.. "It's april first and I saw vandalism, oh no, april first
must be a heavy vandalism day".

So again, I'm not rejecting the notion that april first causes some
harm... only that, given the basic data I provided and without a solid
smoking gun, I consider the likelihood of the harm being significant
enough to warrant a substantial behavioral change to be low enough to
be laughable.