[Foundation-l] Re: Is Wikip/media politic?

Mon Oct 10 08:31:29 UTC 2005

Hi,

Andrew Lih wrote:
> The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, keeper of Wikipedia, was created
> to be "politically neutral," says Wales. "But on a deeper level there
> is something profoundly political about what we're saying – which is
> that everybody should have access to information."
> 
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ITAAW

Thanks for pointing me to this interesting experiment i didn't know.

In danger of beeing pedantic: The quote of Jimbo above was included in 
the article revision written by the journalist AJ Jacobs with "a bunch 
of intentional mistakes" as he wrote (posted by Notafish of 16:58, 20 
September 2005). By the way it also contains the famous 
"IBM-5-minutes-vandalism"-myth (see below). So as a serious researcher I 
cannot trust the source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ITAAW - but 
personally I believe that Jimbo said what is quoted ;-)

== The famous "IBM-5-minutes-vandalism"-myth ==

It is stated frequently:

 > IBM researchers found that most vandalism on Wikipedia was
 > reverted in less than five minutes.

I doubt that anybody has ever read the paper of Viégas, Wattenberg and 
Dave. They write:

"The instances of mass deletion were fixed so quickly that they cannot 
be seen when revisions are spaced by date. This pattern appeared in 
almost every instance of a vandalized page that we examined by hand." 
(page 4, right)

"We defined a mass deletion a version that was at least 90% smaller than 
the previous maximum size for the page [...] Mass deletions where the 
remaining text included the word 'fuck [were] labeled 'MD obscene' [...] 
We then looked at the survival time, that is, the total time that these 
edits remained on the site." (page 5, left)

The results are shown in table 1: Survival time for different kinds of 
revisions (page 5, right)

Revision Type: All content (618,502 times)
mean time=22.3 days, median time=90.4 minutes

Revision Type: Mass delete (3,574 times)
mean time=7.7 days, median time=2.8 minutes

Revision Type: MD obscene (47 times)
mean time=1.8 days, median time=1.7 minutes

So you should better say "Half of the deletions of more then 90% of a 
page are reverted within 3 minutes". As far as I know they never wrote 
that most vandalism on Wikipedia was reverted in less than five minutes 
- it's just a myth like the myths around who invented Wikipedia (Wales 
or Jimbo or both nobody of them?).

Greetings,
Jakob