[Foundation-l] How much of Wikipedia is vandalized? 0.4% of Articles

[Anthony]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/21 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> > On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com
> >wrote:
> >
> >> 2009/8/20 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> >> > I wouldn't suggest looking at the edit history at all, just the most
> >> recent
> >> > revision as of whatever moment in time is chosen.  If vandalism is
> found,
> >> > then and only then would one look through the edit history to find out
> >> when
> >> > it was added.
> >>
> >> That only works if the article is very well referenced and you have
> >> all the references and are willing to fact-check everything. Otherwise
> >> you will miss subtle vandalism like changing the date of birth by a
> >> year.
> >
> >
> > No need for the article to be referenced at all, but yes, it would be
> time
> > consuming, or at least person-time consuming.
>
> You mean you could go and find references for the information
> yourself? I suppose you could, but that is completely impractical.
>

My God.  If a few dozen people couldn't easily determine to a relatively
high degree of certainty what portion of a mere 0.03% of Wikipedia's
articles are *vandalized*, how useless is Wikipedia?

>On the other hand, it'd
> > answer the question, in a way that an automated process never could do
> > (assuming I've got my statistical analysis right, anyway:
> > http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html seems to suggest a 99% confidence
> > level for 664 random samples out of 3 million, but I'm not sure what
> > "response distribution" means).
>
> The site looks like it is for surveys made up of yes/no questions, I
> don't think it is going to apply to this.
>

"Is this article vandalized?" is a yes/no question...