While the time and effort that went into Robert Rohde's analysis is certainly extensive, the outcomes are based on so many flawed assumptions about the nature of vandalism and vandalism reversion, publicize at one's peril the key "finding" of a 0.4% vandalism rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_McCain&diff=169808394&oldid=169720853 11 hours Reverted with no tags. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maria_Cantwell&diff=prev&oldid=160400298 46 days Reverted with note: "Undid revision 160400298 by 75.133.82.218" By the way, there was a two-minute vandalism in the interim, so in many cases, just because an analyst finds a "recent and short" incident, he or she may be completely missing a longer-term incident. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ted_Stevens&diff=prev&oldid=170850508 There goes your "rvv" theory. In this case, "rvv" was a flag for even more preposterous vandalism. The notion that these are lightly-watched or lightly-edited articles is a bit difficult to swallow, since they are the biographical articles about three United States senators. These articles were analyzed by an independent team of volunteers, and we found that the 100 senatorial articles were in deliberate disrepair about 6.8% of the time, which would vastly differ from Rohde's analysis. Certainly, one could argue that articles about political figures may be vandalized more often, but one might also counter that argument with the assumption that "more eyes" ought to be watching these articles and repairing them. More detail here: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Wikipedia_Vandalism_Study Admittedly, there were some minor flaws with our study's methodology, too. These are reviewed on the Discussion page. But, as with Rohde's assessment, if anything, we may have underrepresented the problem at 6.8%. I remain unimpressed with Wikipedia's accuracy rate, and I am bewildered why "flagged revisions" have not been implemented yet. Greg _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
