[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 11/20/2013 11:59 AM, Michael Snow wrote:
> An essential part of collaboration is, after all, reviewing each other's
> work. From the terseness of the comment, it might be alluding to either
> aspect or both.

That's actually an interesting question that has been lurking beneath
all the "editing is going down" nervousness.

How much of that 'editing' was, in fact, busy work made immaterial by
technical advantage (bots, extensions, abusefilter)?  The number of
antivandalism edits a /human/ has to do in a day has most certainly come
down a *lot* since c. 2006; this no doubt contributed to a large - now
diminishing - fraction of total edits.

It's not clear to me that the number of *productive* edits has been
going down all that much (if at all) in the past several years; the
proportion of edits that were tedious and repetitive clearly has.

Are you arguing that there is *value* in volunteers spending time on
work that could be automated?  Except for artificially driving up edit
counts, that is time (and effort) that would be better spent pretty much
anywhere else!

-- Marc