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

Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton at gmail.com
Thu Aug 20 23:20:25 UTC 2009


2009/8/21 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> 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.

You mean you could go and find references for the information
yourself? I suppose you could, but that is completely impractical.

>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).

The site looks like it is for surveys made up of yes/no questions, I
don't think it is going to apply to this.



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