Wikipedia talk:Vandalism statistics

See mailarchive:foundation-l/2009-August/054171.html

Similar studies

(Some quick links, addition of proper citations would be welcome.)

• The seminal "history flow" study conducted by IBM researchers in 2003 found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects". The restricted themselves to two narrowly defined classes of vandalism (which today would both be caught by the vandalism bots): mass deletions and mass deletions where the remaining text included the word "fuck". The median survival time was 2.8 minutes/1.7 minutes, the mean survival time 7.7 days/1.8 days - comparable to the 5.2 minutes median time and 14.4 hours mean time that Dragons flight obtained for recent times.
  • history flow: results IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, 2003
  • Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Kushal Dave: Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 575-582, Vienna 2004, ISBN 1-58113-702-8
• A 2007 study titled "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" by University of Minnesota researchers, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-08/Vandalism study (built on the "history flow" study). Amazingly arrived at exactly the same number as the current study (0.37%): "The study estimated a probability of less than one-half percent (0.0037) that the typical viewing of a Wikipedia article would find it in a damaged state. "
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-22/Vandalism
• Many more at Wikipedia:WikiProject Vandalism studies

I totally understand the author's reasons for ignoring the fact that, as he expressed it, "some things flagged as reverts aren't really addressing what we would conventionally consider to be vandalism" (cf. Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars), for the purpose of arriving at a good ballpark figure. However, one cannot help to note that the recently announced results of the PARC group finding "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors" - or at least some public reactions to it - interpreted reverts in the opposite way, namely as good contributions being rejected by narrow-minded (and mostly inner circle) Wikipedians. The PARC researchers say they excluded vandalism, but not by what definition.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 19:36, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Labels used in the last few rows

The labels "Last six months,Last year,Last two years,All-time" might confuse the readers since they haven't been updated for a while.--upulpp 09:40, 14 December 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Upulpp (talk • contribs)