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

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 3:57 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.

It's not just facts.  There are many ways to degrade the qualify of an
article (such as removing entire sections) that would be invisible if
one looks at only one revision.

Anthony seems to be talking about a question of article accuracy
(unless I am misreading him).  That is overlapping issue with
addressing vandalism, but there are a significant number of ways to
commit vandalism that nonetheless have nothing to do with impairing
the resulting article's accuracy.

-Robert Rohde