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

[The Cunctator]

Also, vandalism had always been a red herring, kind of like the terrorism
that justifies the TSA security theater and NBA surveillance or the Red
Scare. It's a wrong-headed obsession that weakens community.
On Nov 22, 2013 2:06 PM, "Steven Walling" <steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:37 AM, WereSpielChequers <
> werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Typo correction and vandalism reversion are certainly both entries to
> > editing, and it isn't just anti-vandalism where the opportunities have
> > declined in recent years. Typos are getting harder to find, especially in
> > stable widely read articles. Yes you can find plenty of typos by checking
> > new pages and recent changes, but I doubt our  5 edits a month editors
> are
> > going to internal maintenance pages like that. I suspect they are readers
> > who fix things they come across. It would be interesting to survey a
> sample
> > of them I suspect we'd find many who are reading Wikipedia just as much
> as
> > they used to, but if they only edit when they spot a mistake then of
> course
> > they will now be editing less frequently. And of course none of that is
> > actually bad, any more than is the loss of large numbers of vandals who
> > used to get into the 5 edits a month band for at least the month in which
> > they did their spree and were blocked..
> >
> > The difficulty of getting precise measurements of "community health"
> makes
> > it a fascinating topic, and with many known factors altering edit levels
> in
> > sometimes poorly understood ways we need to be wary of
> oversimplifications.
> > No-one really knows what would have happened if the many edit filters
> > installed in the last four years had instead been coded as anti vandalism
> > bots, clearly our edit count would now be much higher, but whether it
> would
> > currently be higher or lower than in 2009 when the edit filters were
> > introduced is unknown. Nor should we fret that we shifted so much of our
> > anti-vandalism work from very quick reversion to not accepting edits.
> > However it isn't sensible to  benchmark community health against past
> edit
> > levels, we should really be comparing community activity against
> readership
> > levels. If we do that there is a disconnect between our readership which
> > for years has grown faster than the internet and our community which is
> > broadly stable. To some extent this can be considered a success for
> Vector
> > and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one
> > optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels we
> > always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of
> > Vector. My suspicion is also that the rise of the mobile device,
> especially
> > amongst the young, is turning us from an interactive medium into more of
> a
> > broadcast one. It is also likely to be contributing to the greying of the
> > pedia.
> >
> > I am trying to list the major known and probable causes of changes of the
> > fall in the raw editing levels in a page on
> > wiki<
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F
> > >,
> > feedback welcome.
> >
>
> Holy smokes this thread has gotten off topic, but I'll bite. ;)
>
> Making articles that need spelling and grammar fixes easily available to
> new editors is precisely what we're doing with GettingStarted, our software
> system for introducing newly-registered people to editing. (Docs at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GettingStarted and
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians). We're
> currently
> getting thousands of new people to make their first typo fix a month on
> English Wikipedia, and we're moving to other Wikipedias soon.
>
> In English Wikipedia it's quite easy for us to do so, since there's a large
> category of articles needing copyediting. In other Wikipedias, it's not
> easy, because there is no such category. If you want to help us help
> newbies, the best thing you could do is create a copyediting category on
> your Wikipedia and link it to the appropriate Wikidata item
> (either Q8235695 or Q9137504).
>
> As a side point: when we examine first-time editors contributions, these
> days it's rare to find someone start out by correcting vandalism, probably
> because now bots and users of tools like Huggle or Twinkle catch it all so
> fast. It's so small a number that when we examine samples of new
> contributors in our qualitative research,[1][2] we just put it in the Other
> category of edit types.
>
> Steven
>
> 1.
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/Qualitative_analysis
> 2.
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/OB6/Contribution_quality_and_type
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