[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

[Kat Walsh]

On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> > The missing piece of data is: what proportion of anonymous editors are
> > good contributors?  If it's very small, then it's a non-issue.
>
> I have a theory that for any change made by an anon editor:
>
> - if it's a deletion, it's probably vandalism

Or someone who sees something false about them or someone they know in
an article. We get complaints mailed to Wikimedia all the time that "I
was trying to remove this false statement about me and then I was
blocked for vandalism!"

Or someone who is really confused. A German usability study found some
people who clicked "edit" and got confused submitted a blanked page.
(Yes, I scratched my head when I read that, too.)

See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Usability/Test_Februar_2006
-- text is in English.

> - if it's the addition of more than a sentence, it will probably be
> unsourced and get reverted

Most logged-in users' additions are unsourced, too. Actually additions
of a few sentences are usually at least on the right track (note: my
watchlist is mainly classical music; YMMV). Not sourced, generally,
true, but mostly verifiable if someone went to go find a cite; also
often well-meaning but misguided insertion of opinions or original
research.

Of course, text dumps of full paragraphs or articles, generally
unwikified, are too often copyvio. :-/

> - if it's only a net change of plus or minus 5 characters, it's
> probably a useful copy-edit

Generally agreed. (Sometimes it's sneaky vandalism. :-P)

> Anon make a lot of typo corrections, but are rarely bold enough to fix
> major problems in articles.

...though when they are, they are often accused of vandalism,
especially as most haven't gotten the memo about talk pages or edit
summaries yet.

On the whole I am in favor of as few restrictions on anonymous editing
as necessary. It may be true that most vandalism comes from anons (I
don't have data for this). However, it doesn't follow that most anon
contributions are vandalism. (I don't have data for this either, but I
suspect most of it is not. The majority of it may well be in need of
cleanup or sourcing, but that could be said of most newbie edits,
logged-in or not.) And raise your hand if you *didn't* make a few anon
edits before signing up. Anyone? A few? I think I would have been put
off if most of the things I wanted to edit when I initally saw the
site were semiprotected.

I do like semi-protection as a defense against the hordes of drive-by
vandals who come by in bursts for some reason or another. But I think
we should keep it to a minimum, and be careful not to use protection
-- full or semi -- where it has not been shown to be needed.

(IMO, the most problematic edits don't come from newbies, anyway, but
from more seasoned users who have an agenda to push and know how to
game the system... but perhaps that's colored by my doing more dispute
resolution than RC patrol.)

-Kat

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