[Wikimedia-l] effect of edit filter on editing levels, (was thanking anons)
Marc, It isn't just the vandalism and reversion of vandalism that we've lost as a result of the edit filters (originally known as abuse filters) there is also the lost userpage warnings, AIV reports, block messages and removal of AIV reports:) But yes the majority would have been vandalism and its reversion. Supporting this theory, we have as one would expect a drop in the number of editors clearing the five edit a month threshold - typically any vandal who got through the whole four level warning cycle and then did something block worthy would have made it into the 5 or more edits count for that month. I suspect we've also seen a some of our active vandal fighters drop away or shift to things that involve fewer edits per hour. Unfortunately I don't think we yet have any sort of estimated editor hours donated figure, for example one could do this crudely by only counting unique hours in which an editor has made at least one edit. It would be salutary to see how that was changing over time. Also the pattern of decline in raw edit count fits with a steady refinement of the edit filters from 2009 to the present day. The exception of course being the decline from 2007-2009, but I suspect much of that comes with Huggle et al speeding up vandalism reversion. Once you start blocking people after half a dozen edits rather than a couple of dozen you are bound to have a drop in total editing, Of course there remains the issue that our audience is still growing faster than the Internet whilst nobody really knows whether the underlying rate of goodfaith editing is increasing or stable. I suspect that much of this is the growth of mobile where we are much more of a broadcast medium than an interactive one. But that is a rather more tenuous theory than the known effectiveness of the edit filters. I wrote an essay about this last springhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F, I'd be interested in your take on it. Erik Zachte tweeted it and I don't think that anyone has rebutted the main points. Regards Jonathan -- Message: 4 Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 23:38:15 -0500 From: Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users Message-ID: 52d4bf37.90...@uberbox.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 On 01/13/2014 11:20 PM, Tim Starling wrote: The English Wikipedia edit rate has been declining since about January 2007, and is now only 67% of the rate at that time. A linear regression on the edit rate from that time predicts death of the project at around 2030. That's... come /on/ Tim! You know better than to say silly things like that. The abuse filter alone could very well account for this (the prevented edits and the revert that would have taken place). :-) I used to do a lot of patrol back in those years and - for nostalgia's sake - I tried doing a bit over a year ago. The amount of surface vandalism has gone down a *lot* since. -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] effect of edit filter on editing levels, (was thanking anons)
Actually, yes, we do; Aaron Halfaker did a lot of work quantifying and defining 'man-hours' in a Wikipedia sense. On 15 January 2014 10:15, WereSpielChequers werespielchequ...@gmail.comwrote: Marc, It isn't just the vandalism and reversion of vandalism that we've lost as a result of the edit filters (originally known as abuse filters) there is also the lost userpage warnings, AIV reports, block messages and removal of AIV reports:) But yes the majority would have been vandalism and its reversion. Supporting this theory, we have as one would expect a drop in the number of editors clearing the five edit a month threshold - typically any vandal who got through the whole four level warning cycle and then did something block worthy would have made it into the 5 or more edits count for that month. I suspect we've also seen a some of our active vandal fighters drop away or shift to things that involve fewer edits per hour. Unfortunately I don't think we yet have any sort of estimated editor hours donated figure, for example one could do this crudely by only counting unique hours in which an editor has made at least one edit. It would be salutary to see how that was changing over time. Also the pattern of decline in raw edit count fits with a steady refinement of the edit filters from 2009 to the present day. The exception of course being the decline from 2007-2009, but I suspect much of that comes with Huggle et al speeding up vandalism reversion. Once you start blocking people after half a dozen edits rather than a couple of dozen you are bound to have a drop in total editing, Of course there remains the issue that our audience is still growing faster than the Internet whilst nobody really knows whether the underlying rate of goodfaith editing is increasing or stable. I suspect that much of this is the growth of mobile where we are much more of a broadcast medium than an interactive one. But that is a rather more tenuous theory than the known effectiveness of the edit filters. I wrote an essay about this last spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F , I'd be interested in your take on it. Erik Zachte tweeted it and I don't think that anyone has rebutted the main points. Regards Jonathan -- Message: 4 Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 23:38:15 -0500 From: Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users Message-ID: 52d4bf37.90...@uberbox.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 On 01/13/2014 11:20 PM, Tim Starling wrote: The English Wikipedia edit rate has been declining since about January 2007, and is now only 67% of the rate at that time. A linear regression on the edit rate from that time predicts death of the project at around 2030. That's... come /on/ Tim! You know better than to say silly things like that. The abuse filter alone could very well account for this (the prevented edits and the revert that would have taken place). :-) I used to do a lot of patrol back in those years and - for nostalgia's sake - I tried doing a bit over a year ago. The amount of surface vandalism has gone down a *lot* since. -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Oliver Keyes Product Analyst Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] effect of edit filter on editing levels, (was thanking anons)
On 01/15/2014 01:15 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote: Of course there remains the issue that our audience is still growing faster than the Internet whilst nobody really knows whether the underlying rate of goodfaith editing is increasing or stable. My own eyeball metric on this is entirely subjective, but anecdotally I observe that (a) we have considerably more content than in 2007 and (b) the average quality level of the most of that content is significantly higher. To me, this means that either the number of constructive edits that are not reverts has, at least, remained fairly stable or that we have gotten more efficient at quality per edit. Most likely both. My own skepticism about the magnitude or even existence of the edit decline problem is rooted in that simple observation. I worry that by focusing on raw numbers like number of clicks on the save button we are loosing sight of the real objectives, and that measure meant to correct the wrong issue could end up harming more than helping. (As could be argued in a pastiche of your essay that the obvious solution would be to have Mediawiki insert random typos in articles to give visitors easy things to fix and drive edit numbers up). -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
