[Foundation-l] Interesting legal action

Thomas Morton morton.thomas at googlemail.com
Sun May 22 23:20:50 UTC 2011


>  my personal interpretation is that BLP failings were more likely to
be seen and more likely to cause some kind of real or perceived
harm, leading to a greater response rate.

I suppose that if your a notable figure... you probably take a look to see
if a Wikipedia article exists... and even money says you won't like what you
find.

Other subject don't quite have the "personal" connection :)

Tom

On 22 May 2011 23:03, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

> On 22 May 2011 19:58, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The BLP problem is a very divisive one on the English Wikipedia, but
> > it's not entirely clear how grounded it is in fact. Sometimes we're
> > told OTRS is overwhelmed by the number of BLP complaints, but no
> > figures are given.
> >
> > Some hard stats -- X number of complaints concerning Y number of
> > articles within time T, of which Z were actionable -- would be very
> > useful.
>
> Some figures Amory Meltzer and I came up with in 2010:
>
> In a single week in late 2009, we got an average of 40-50 active
> tickets per day - not spam, not people thinking we were someone else,
> etc. 15% of those were about BLP issues. If we look *only* at tickets
> about specific article issues (removing the general WP/WMF-related
> enquiries and "normal" vandalism reports), BLP tickets made up 30% of
> the traffic. Making an estimate for recurring cases, this suggests we
> get contacted regarding 2,000 to 2,500 BLP issues per year. I don't
> have any figures on actionability, I'm afraid, but it's an intriguing
> question...
>
> The vast majority of these were regarding one specific BLP article; a
> couple were BLP issues on non-BLP articles, usually companies and
> towns. All told, BLP articles proportionally generated about two to
> three times more issues than other content.
>
> The interesting aspect here is that two-thirds of BLP issues are
> reported by the subject, or by someone close to or involved with the
> subject (a relative, colleague, agent, etc). If we look *only* at
> third-party reports, BLPs seem to generate about as much traffic as
> any other content. The same held for looking solely at "normal"
> vandalism reports - 15%. Read what you will into that one... my
> personal interpretation is that BLP failings were more likely to be
> seen and more likely to cause some kind of real or perceived harm,
> leading to a greater response rate.
>
> From the *workload* perspective, however, whilst BLPs only make up
> ~15% of traffic, they take up substantially more time and effort. My
> initial estimate was that they take up at least half the editor-hours
> put into handling OTRS tickets; it would be hard to quantify this
> without some fairly detailed surveys, but it feels right.
>
> Writing to someone involved with the issue personally is always more
> complicated, especially if they're - justifiably - angry or worried
> about the situation. The problems are often quite complex, so can sit
> longer while people consider how to approach the issue, and are more
> likely to involve (long-term) onwiki followup, or require multiple
> rounds of correspondence.
>
> As a result, I suspect my 30% of "article issues" and Christine's 45%
> are closer than they might seem - there's an unusually large backlog
> of tickets this past month, compared to the situation a few months
> ago, and so a count based on "still open" will suggest more of them
> than actually come in on a daily basis.
>
> Regarding a separate BLP queue, we found that a significant number of
> tickets get handled in the "wrong" queues, because it's often simpler
> for someone to respond to the email wherever it's come in rather than
> move the ticket and then respond to it. Which is perfectly fine, of
> course - a response goes out and everyone's happy - but it does mean
> that the response data categorised by queue is often fairly
> inaccurate. For meaningful data on any particular class of tickets,
> you'd probably have to sample.
>
> Apologies for the length, but hopefully that's of some use!
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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