[WikiEN-l] Re: The whole point of wikipedia

Wed Oct 19 19:13:41 UTC 2005

From: "Tony Sidaway"

> But we do see those changes:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges

If you think all vandalism is noticed in RC then you are seriously wrong, it 
is totally unquestionable that a significant amount does get through, sure 
its not much compared to the total volume, but it is still way too much for 
an encyclopedia that is trying to establish credibility.

> 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.

Sorry, in this case I was using vandalism as a blanket term for bad 
edting/POV pushing etc. not just outright vandalism, and as has been 
discussed, this is exactly the type of bad editting that erodes articles.

> 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.

Like I said, it is a fact that RC patrollers don't pick up everthing, I 
don't see how you could possibly argue otherwise.

Anyway, this has little to do with the blocking proposal it originated from 
and I can't win this arguement anyway because there isn't a chance in hell 
that the almighty one would ever let editting rights be tightened up at all.

Regards

Martin 