On 10/19/05, Martin Richards <Martin(a)velocitymanager.com> wrote:
From: Tony Sidaway:
> You might think so, but it isn't. Even the most vandalized articles
> on Wikipedia are well under control. The category "Protected against
> vandalism", which contains a list of all pages currently with a
> vprotect template, is almost empty of real articles.
[...]
Thats because we only protect pages under fairly extreme circumstances. The
real vandalism problem is the one we don't see, the articles that aren't
being watched closely (i.e. the ones that make up the bulk of the ~750,000
articles we have).
But we do see those changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges
But even high profile
articles are not immune to vandalism, if you monitor the Bill Gates article
it is painfully obvious why it was so badly criticised; because it is a
constant war between vandalism/crap editing and reverting back, any good
editing just get eroded away.
Reverting vandalism is an almost transparent activity. When I was
regularly editing the Dubya article I'd just ignore it completely,
edit on through, and the RC patrollers and other interested parties
took care of cleaning it up.
Article quality in the Gates article, we discussed last week. Nothing
at all to do with vandalism.
The other problem that vandalism causes is that it wastes so much time of
editors who would otherwise being making articles better rather than
stopping them being destroyed.
Is that really true, though? How many editors do we have doing RC
patrol? I'm on #wikipedia-en-vandalism right now and there are about
a dozen voiced users (ie regulars) on channel. Most of them are
idling. A load of other editors will be involved at any one time in
fixing recent change, but if you look at the deletion log and see who
is doing deletions and restores, you can get a maximum value for the
number of editors who have been on active patrol today. 57 editors
are responsible for the last 500 deletions--which covers the last 9
hours. But we have many thousands of editors contributing every day.
For instance, of the last 500 edits, there were 287 unique usernames
or IPs.
There may be many editors involved in dealing with vandalism, but it's
a drop in the bucket compared to the resources we have available.
Plus, as I said, vandalism deters good
editors from taking us seriously and contributing.
The real cost is the one you don't see. Not the one you see in recent
changes.
Martin
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l