[Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data

[Robert Rohde]

I've just read two different news stories on Flagged Revisions that
described vandalism as a "growing problem" for Wikipedia.

With that in mind, I would like to highlight one specific point in the
analysis I just did.

The frequency of reverts to articles -- as a fraction of total edits
-- has remained virtually constant for almost three years now.  There
is no evidence that the community is making reverts more often today
(relative to total edits) than we were in 2007.

Hence, I would suggest that describing vandalism as a "growing"
problem is probably erroneous with respect to actual editing
behaviors.  Maybe our concern for ensuring accuracy and addressing
vandalism has grown, but the scale of the underlying problem of
incoming vandalism appears to be more or less constant.

-Robert Rohde