[Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles

[Gregory Kohs]

While the time and effort that went into Robert Rohde's analysis is
certainly extensive, the outcomes are based on so many flawed assumptions
about the nature of vandalism and vandalism reversion, publicize at one's
peril the key "finding" of a 0.4% vandalism rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_McCain&diff=169808394&oldid=169720853
11 hours
Reverted with no tags.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_Cantwell&diff=prev&oldid=160400298
46 days
Reverted with note: "Undid revision 160400298 by 75.133.82.218"
By the way, there was a two-minute vandalism in the interim, so in many
cases, just because an analyst finds a "recent and short" incident, he or
she may be completely missing a longer-term incident.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ted_Stevens&diff=prev&oldid=170850508
There goes your "rvv" theory.  In this case, "rvv" was a flag for even more
preposterous vandalism.

The notion that these are lightly-watched or lightly-edited articles is a
bit difficult to swallow, since they are the biographical articles about
three United States senators.  These articles were analyzed by an
independent team of volunteers, and we found that the 100 senatorial
articles were in deliberate disrepair about 6.8% of the time, which would
vastly differ from Rohde's analysis.  Certainly, one could argue that
articles about political figures may be vandalized more often, but one might
also counter that argument with the assumption that "more eyes" ought to be
watching these articles and repairing them.  More detail here:

http://www.mywikibiz.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study

Admittedly, there were some minor flaws with our study's methodology, too.
These are reviewed on the Discussion page.  But, as with Rohde's assessment,
if anything, we may have underrepresented the problem at 6.8%.

I remain unimpressed with Wikipedia's accuracy rate, and I am bewildered why
"flagged revisions" have not been implemented yet.

Greg