Also, vandalism had always been a red herring, kind of like the terrorism that justifies the TSA security theater and NBA surveillance or the Red Scare. It's a wrong-headed obsession that weakens community. On Nov 22, 2013 2:06 PM, "Steven Walling" <steven.wall...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 12:37 AM, WereSpielChequers < > werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Typo correction and vandalism reversion are certainly both entries to > > editing, and it isn't just anti-vandalism where the opportunities have > > declined in recent years. Typos are getting harder to find, especially in > > stable widely read articles. Yes you can find plenty of typos by checking > > new pages and recent changes, but I doubt our 5 edits a month editors > are > > going to internal maintenance pages like that. I suspect they are readers > > who fix things they come across. It would be interesting to survey a > sample > > of them I suspect we'd find many who are reading Wikipedia just as much > as > > they used to, but if they only edit when they spot a mistake then of > course > > they will now be editing less frequently. And of course none of that is > > actually bad, any more than is the loss of large numbers of vandals who > > used to get into the 5 edits a month band for at least the month in which > > they did their spree and were blocked.. > > > > The difficulty of getting precise measurements of "community health" > makes > > it a fascinating topic, and with many known factors altering edit levels > in > > sometimes poorly understood ways we need to be wary of > oversimplifications. > > No-one really knows what would have happened if the many edit filters > > installed in the last four years had instead been coded as anti vandalism > > bots, clearly our edit count would now be much higher, but whether it > would > > currently be higher or lower than in 2009 when the edit filters were > > introduced is unknown. Nor should we fret that we shifted so much of our > > anti-vandalism work from very quick reversion to not accepting edits. > > However it isn't sensible to benchmark community health against past > edit > > levels, we should really be comparing community activity against > readership > > levels. If we do that there is a disconnect between our readership which > > for years has grown faster than the internet and our community which is > > broadly stable. To some extent this can be considered a success for > Vector > > and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one > > optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels we > > always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of > > Vector. My suspicion is also that the rise of the mobile device, > especially > > amongst the young, is turning us from an interactive medium into more of > a > > broadcast one. It is also likely to be contributing to the greying of the > > pedia. > > > > I am trying to list the major known and probable causes of changes of the > > fall in the raw editing levels in a page on > > wiki< > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F > > >, > > feedback welcome. > > > > Holy smokes this thread has gotten off topic, but I'll bite. ;) > > Making articles that need spelling and grammar fixes easily available to > new editors is precisely what we're doing with GettingStarted, our software > system for introducing newly-registered people to editing. (Docs at > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GettingStarted and > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians). We're > currently > getting thousands of new people to make their first typo fix a month on > English Wikipedia, and we're moving to other Wikipedias soon. > > In English Wikipedia it's quite easy for us to do so, since there's a large > category of articles needing copyediting. In other Wikipedias, it's not > easy, because there is no such category. If you want to help us help > newbies, the best thing you could do is create a copyediting category on > your Wikipedia and link it to the appropriate Wikidata item > (either Q8235695 or Q9137504). > > As a side point: when we examine first-time editors contributions, these > days it's rare to find someone start out by correcting vandalism, probably > because now bots and users of tools like Huggle or Twinkle catch it all so > fast. It's so small a number that when we examine samples of new > contributors in our qualitative research,[1][2] we just put it in the Other > category of edit types. > > Steven > > 1. > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/Qualitative_analysis > 2. > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians/OB6/Contribution_quality_and_type > _______________________________________________ > 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> _______________________________________________ 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>