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

[Anthony]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/20 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> > I wouldn't suggest looking at the edit history at all, just the most
> recent
> > revision as of whatever moment in time is chosen.  If vandalism is found,
> > then and only then would one look through the edit history to find out
> when
> > it was added.
>
> That only works if the article is very well referenced and you have
> all the references and are willing to fact-check everything. Otherwise
> you will miss subtle vandalism like changing the date of birth by a
> year.


No need for the article to be referenced at all, but yes, it would be time
consuming, or at least person-time consuming.  On the other hand, it'd
answer the question, in a way that an automated process never could do
(assuming I've got my statistical analysis right, anyway:
http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html seems to suggest a 99% confidence
level for 664 random samples out of 3 million, but I'm not sure what
"response distribution" means).