[WikiEN-l] Re: The whole point of wikipedia

[Martin Richards]

From: Tony Sidaway:


> You might think so, but it isn't.  Even the most vandalized articles
> on Wikipedia are well under control.  The category "Protected against
> vandalism", which contains a list of all pages currently with a
> vprotect template, is almost empty of real articles.
>
> It's easy to get the Chicken Licken attitude if you don't look at the
> actual facts.
>
> Vandalism is in no way, shape or form a serious ongoing threat to 
> Wikipedia.

Thats because we only protect pages under fairly extreme circumstances. The 
real vandalism problem is the one we don't see, the articles that aren't 
being watched closely (i.e. the ones that make up the bulk of the ~750,000 
articles we have).

The most vandalised pages are ok because lots of people watch them, only 
just a few minutes ago I reverted some serious one-off vandalism on a fairly 
important article that was done over 2 weeks ago. But even high profile 
articles are not immune to vandalism, if you monitor the Bill Gates article 
it is painfully obvious why it was so badly criticised; because it is a 
constant war between vandalism/crap editing and reverting back, any good 
editing just get eroded away.

The other problem that vandalism causes is that it wastes so much time of 
editors who would otherwise being making articles better rather than 
stopping them being destroyed. Plus, as I said, vandalism deters good 
editors from taking us seriously and contributing.

The real cost is the one you don't see. Not the one you see in recent 
changes.

Martin