[WikiEN-l] Date vandalism

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/23/06, Ruud Koot <r.koot at students.uu.nl> wrote:
> If you can't distinguish between a small correction or vandalism, this
> probably means the fact isn't sourced. Either add a source, or if you
> can't at least a {{citeneeded}} or related tag.

Right. In my mind there are really two tightly related problems:

1) Catching that a simple piece of factual data has been changed.
and
2) Actually verifying that the change is good.

(1) is more important, because if we don't know that a change is made
we can't verify it... But I also think that (1) is the easier part to
improve... We could have a bot detecting many such changes and place
them on a list, for example. Not a complete solution, but with a
little effort we could probably quadruple our effectiveness.  Over
time, such features could be enhanced in a decentralized way by things
like invisible <fact></fact> tags that tell bots about immutable text.
(bot would keep a list of fact tags it has seen in an article and warn
if one is changed or removed)

Some cynical offlist mail I received suggested that I might really be
advocating stable versions here.... and it's true that I think stable
versions will be a vast improvement on this point.  But even with
stable versions I'm not confident that such changes would get the high
level of scrutiny they deserve, and that any technical or social
improvements we come up with would also be useful in a future with
stable versions.

(2) is much harder...   If the fact is cited to an online resource
then it is just a question of motivation to get people to check.  ...
But what if it's cited to an offline resource or, more commonly, not
cited at all?

I have mixed feelings about how to address (2)...

We could, for example, treat the case like a dispute over uncited
material, where our default action is usually to remove the uncited
claims and request that the disputing parties provide citations. But
since there is so much totally uncited basic data, such a policy would
have the effect of creating a new form of vandalism... and potentially
result in an overall reduction of good information.  We could also
revert unless the later editor justifies their claim.... but I've seen
a number of comment less date changes which did check out, so that too
has problems.

I like the suggestion of changing the edit summary text to the most
simplistic "Please explain your edit" or the like.  I am not sure I
see the benefits in mandatory edit summaries... at least today the
lack of a summary is a reasonable indicator that the edit may need a
deeper look.