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

Thu Oct 20 01:07:46 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 10/19/05, Martin Richards <Martin at velocitymanager.com> wrote:
>
>>This is a project to make the best encyclopedia ever, policy and procedure
>>should evolve as our problems evolve, and vandalim is one of the biggest
>>problems
>>
>
>
>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.
>
>It's easy to get the Chicken Licken attitude if you don't look at the
>actual facts.
>
>Vandalism is in no way, shape or form a serious ongoing threat to Wikipedia.
>
I think you're discounting the amount of time that can be be sucked
up by patrolling. For instance, my longish watchlist has very few of
the "popular" articles on it, but still gives me some 500 edits to
review each day. Of those, most are by editors I know and trust, so
I don't look at those unless the summary line is interesting, but that
leaves maybe 100 by anons. Of those, maybe 5 of the anon edits are
the obvious "Joey is gay"-type vandalism, but since there is no way
to tell which ones they are without bringing up a diff, I need to
look at all of those edits. That can easily suck up an hour - very
often at least one of the vandalisms is "complex" in that it involves
multiple edits, and maybe a ham-handed incomplete attempt to fix,
thus requiring careful study of the history to make sure all is scrubbed.

Of the other 95 anon edits, most are trivial - spellfix, commas, random
rearrangement changing good English into broken English :-), etc.
This leaves a handful of valuable edits, but the average total is less
than I could have added in the same hour just working from the books in
my personal library. Nevertheless, I do the patrolling because it seems
that many of the pages I'm watching have no other reviewers - more than
a few times I've overlooked an anon's trash and it went unnoticed for
days or weeks.

So yes, we're keeping the random vandalism under control, but IMHO
just barely, and at the price of time that should be going into
development of better content. I think we really need to consider
whether unlimited anon editing is helping or hurting our primary
goal of encyclopedia writing.

Stan