[WikiEN-l] Deleting over 45000 items

[Sean Barrett]

Ken Arromdee stated for the record:
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, Sean Barrett wrote:
>> It is entirely untrue that "spoiler warnings were deleted en masse by
>> one or two people using automation software without reading the articles
>> they were in."
> 
> If you assume it takes a minute per article, 45000 articles is 750 hours of
> nothing but reading Wikipedia articles.  And the number 45000 is only the
> last number we have; it isn't really the total.
> 
> It's impossible to read all those articles.  It *had* to be done without
> reading the articles (and certainly without achieving consensus on each
> article individually.)

It was not done by "one or two people" -- there were dozens if not
hundreds involved.

It was not done by "people using automation software" unless you broaden
"automation software" into meaninglessness -- I used a tabbed browser.

It takes far less than one minute to determine that "Three Little Pigs,"
"Thousand Nights and a Night," and "Hamlet" do not need spoiler
warnings.  Using a more reasonable estimate of six seconds to scan an
article to determine if the spoiler tag is there to protect some
revelation on the order of someone dying in one of Shakespeare's
tragedies, we find that 45000 articles can be corrected by 100 editors
in (gasp) 45 minutes.

There is no truth in your statement quoted above, and no point in
further discussion.

-- 
 Sean Barrett     | The complete list of
 sean at epoptic.com | everything on the Web:
                  |  0
                  |  1

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 250 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20070620/5770b0fe/attachment.pgp