Wikipedia talk:Counter-Vandalism Unit/Vandalism studies/Study 3

Consider this a starting point for Study 3. What do we want to accomplish with this study?

Study ideas

I think the easiest thing to do (so that we can all get back into the swing of Studying Vandalism) would be a recreation of the Obama study, using Mitt Romney. It will allow us an apples-to-apples comparison of what has changed in regards to vandalism (as opposed to, say, edit warring) over the last 4 years. I also suggest we re-look at the numbers from the Obama Study. The Obama Study asked the question "Is semi-protection of hot-button articles a good thing?" or "Are IP editors bad?". I think a more important question to ask is "Is Vandalism (particularly IP Vandalism) as serious a threat to the Encyclopedia as it had been?". I would hypothesize "No, it is not; in fact disruptive editing is a bigger problem". So let's use our Scientific method and develop an experiment to gain the datums that we can compare to those produced by the Obama Study.
Unless anyone has any better ideas. Achowat (talk) 16:03, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Per Meph below I think we need to finish the Obama study before we do the Romney study, but I think that's what study 3 will be. Dan653 (talk) 02:35, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Ok, so this is going to be hard to read, but per below, I agree that we just look at the shortcomings of the Obama study and apply it to a study of the Romney page. How can information (such as active page watchers, read rate, etc) be gleaned? Achowat (talk) 12:40, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Achowat, some of the tools for monitoring these already exist: Wikipedia article traffic statistics, Page view statistics for Wikimedia projects, Equazcion's Active Watchers tool, and MZMcBride's earlier Watcher. Mephistophelian (talk) 20:19, 7 August 2012 (UTC).

Acho, what are you referring to by "read rate"? Theopolisme TALK 20:25, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

How often a page is read. For instance, it's possible that some obscure Azerbaijani Olympic Water-polo player's page is in a constant state of Vandalism, but if no one ever reads it, it's doing little damage to the encyclopedia. Achowat (talk) 20:43, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Incorporate feedback

Small-scale, comparative studies are certainly practical in terms of resources, and this is arguably the principal advantage. Perhaps the immediate disadvantage to this comparative study between the Obama and Romney articles is that the research surrounding the former isn't complete, specifically in lacking any conclusions whatsoever. There are several interesting reflections on the scope of this earlier research:

Perhaps it is a little late to bring this up, but the scope of the study seems to be too narrow. Rather just analysing if ANON edits helped or hurt the article, the study should have included the damage that IP vandalism caused Wikipedia in the form of editor and admin wasted time and frustration. Otherwise, a true cost and benefit analysis of ANON edits can not be done. If a quality Wikipedian's time is wasted it means Wikipedia will have missed out on some of his benefital edits.

To calculate the impact of the vandalism on editors and readers the statistics "number of editors with the Obama article on their watch list" and the "read rate of the Obama article" are needed. Are these statistics available?

If the tentative hypothesis for the Romney study is: 'Is vandalism, particularly IP vandalism, as serious a threat to the encyclopedia as it had been?', the risk in changing the premise is that this proposal misses the opportunity to incorporate the earlier feedback and address shortcomings. Meph^talk 19:03, 4 August 2012 (UTC).

Why not pick a topic related to Science? HARSH (talk) 14:42, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, why not pick a topic related to Science? Anti-Quasar (talk) Anti-Quasar (talk) 16:21, 26 August 2012 (UTC)