[WikiEN-l] Unreverted vandalism

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 12:21 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 February 2010 17:17, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> b) Use reversions. Sample a thousand uses of rollback from the recent
>>> changes list, find time between that edit and the one it was
>>> reverting.
>>
>> That one sounds easier. If only people wouldn't use rollback inappropriately...
>
> Looking for rollback edits is a good way to find vandalism that was
> reverted quickly, but as Andrew says it won't find old vandalism on
> articles with subsequent edits, which is essential if the intention it
> to find out how much vandalism takes a long time to be reverted.

And such are very common. In high-vandalism pages, it's easy for
entire sections to just drop out in the back and forth. Bot edits
badly exacerbate the issue because they edit whenever the heck they
feel like it, and increase the noise in diffs.

An example: while looking at a reversion of a few anon edits on
[[Legalism (Chinese philosophy)]], I grew suspicious of the ordering
of sections - it seemed a little off, a little too choppy. I looked at
consolidated diffs back to January, finding nothing in particular, but
it was only when I gave it a last try all the way back to December,
that I figured it out: 2 entire substantial sections had gotten
deleted.

I had to manually copy them back in because of all the bot activity in
the interim: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Legalism_%28Chinese_philosophy%29&action=historysubmit&diff=342300729&oldid=341823153

-- 
gwern