[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and Its Consequences"

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's another outside view of the goings-on in Wikipedia, especially with
> respect to the current trend toward backing away from the former pure
> interpretation of the "anyone can edit" part of your slogan.
>
> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1606233&seqNum=4

"The 2007 study also indicated that human Wikipedia editors, as
opposed to anti-vandal robots, made 100 percent of the corrections,"

Why do people love to misconstrue research in such bogus ways?

His cited supporting evidence for this claim studied _14_ examples of
vandalism in 2006 (and about as much in total from all prior years).
A zero-bot result in a sample that small would still be fairly likely
even if bots were doing a pretty considerable amount of the work.
(E.g. 5% for 1/5 reverts)... and 2006 was really back when the
automated anti-vandalism tools were really getting started, predates
abusefilter, etc.

I'm sure there are many interesting things to say on this subject but
I'm too distracted by all the strawman arguments.

It's fine as an opinion piece, too bad that many people feel the need
to stuff their editorials with misconstrued data in order to look like
research rather than an op-ed.