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

[Anthony]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.


Why do you assume that number of reverts has any correlation with amount of
vandalism?  Has this been studied?