[WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Thomas Dalton]

On 31 May 2012 17:03, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:
> This, I think, is a major issue which make the results useless
>
> * The edit summary implies policy knowledge, I'd only check an edit like
> that on my watchlist on occasion. Not every edit needs checking, so we use
> our common sense over what likely need checking
>
> * I believe that edit summary probably met a number of heuristics used by
> the anti-vandal tools to filter out "good" edits. Which means it
> immediately removes them from the "front line" of scrutiny.

It does demonstrate a problem with our processes, though. There are
three ways in which bad edits can get reverted:

1) They get spotted on recent changes (probably using automated or
semi-automated tools these days). It isn't practical to check every
edit, so you can get your edit skipped over fairly easily by just
giving it a good edit summary. If it isn't reverted within a few
minutes, it isn't going to get spotted by this first line of defence.

2) They get spotted on someone's watchlist. Watchlists don't move as
fast as recent changes, so you get a few hours, maybe even a couple of
days, in which to spot something, but again good edit summaries will
cause you to ignore an edit to an article you aren't watching too
closely. That means only articles that are watched by someone that
cares enough about them to check every edit, and where that someone
checks their watchlist within a few hours of the edit being made, will
get protected by this second line.

3) The third line is someone going to the article for some other
reason, spotted the vandalism and fixing it. There is no time limit
for this, and it isn't unusual for vandalism to an obscure article to
be fixed months after it happened. This line isn't going to detect bad
removals, though, since there is nothing there to spot.

That means bad removals with good edit summaries to articles that
aren't closely watched will often never get reverted.

This could be improved by making it more practical to check every
edit, perhaps using the flagged revisions feature (at the moment, we
probably check suspicious looking edits multiple times, so there is
spare resource to check the others if we could just be more efficient
about it).