Episode 85: Felipe Ortega and Ed Chi
Andrew Lih and Andrew Phillips interview two prominent researchers of Wikipedia: Felipe Ortega and Ed Chi. Their research was cited in a widely discussed Wall Street Journal article “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“. We discuss the accuracy of the statistic that 49,000 editors have departed Wikipedia, and the long term prospects of researching and modeling Wikipedia’s growth and community health.
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When did the anti-vandal bots get built into the Wikimedia software?
Whenever that happened it should have caused a step reduction in edits as the vandalism edits and the subsequent reverts would disappear from the logs.
How were vandal edits (as measured by antivandalbot reverts) affected by this 49,000 reduction you noticed? Did they drop at the same time? In proportion? Not at all?
Comment by filceolaire — December 5, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
(I’m posting this as I download the episode, so please pardon my lack of direct commentary.)
@filceolaire: The anti-vandal bots are only “built in” to the Wikimedia software in any way as of the implementation of the AbuseFilter extension, which came out March 2009 (I know this because I created filter #12, in the first rush; my next, less than 24 hours later, was #46). Bots are specifically separate from Wikimedia’s MediaWiki software: they’re designed, coded, and run by users. MediaWiki’s involvement is primarily through the API and the “bot” user right, which each provide significant support for bots.
Anti-vandal bots in general have been around since at least 2006: it’s easy to trace it back that far since that’s when the user page of Tawkerbot2, one of the early anti-vandal bots, was created.
Comment by Nihiltres — December 5, 2009 @ 6:43 pm
Although Tawkerbot2 was likely the first widely recognized anti vandalism bot, several did exist before, User:Curps for example ran an automated blocking script – an “adminbot” which was quite controversial at the time.
Even the idea of vandalism revert bots caused a huge controversy – when I started running TB2 there was considerable pushback – “can a bot be trusted” etc but then people realized it caught a good chunk of “stupid vandalism” and fast – and eventually people got to the point where they freaked if it wasn’t there.
That being said, having it all running in MediaWiki saves a lot of bandwidth / CPU cycles. The original TB2 host actually was recycled about 6 months ago.
Comment by Tawker — December 11, 2009 @ 3:17 am
At least in the PARC analyses, we have taken out all of the vandalism edits and rvv’s out of our analyses to understand true editor behavior. Of course, this still doesn’t account for things like sockpuppeting, but at least it should have taken out all of the bots and identified vandal edits.
Comment by Ed H. Chi — December 21, 2009 @ 10:50 am