Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vandalism studies/Study2/Archive1

message: ===User:DavidCBryant's comments from the last study===
*To do simple statistical analyses like the one you're after, spreadsheet software is appropriate. Has anyone entered the data into a spreadsheet program, like Excel, or Open Office? If not, I'll try to get it done in the next couple of days.
:*Minitab would be even better. If someone has access to that it's possible to get some great regression analysis. --Spangineerws (háblame) 02:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: some suggestions for this study, new perspectives

message: *To do simple statistical analyses like the one you're after, spreadsheet software is appropriate. Has anyone entered the data into a spreadsheet program, like Excel, or Open Office? If not, I'll try to get it done in the next couple of days.
:*Minitab would be even better. If someone has access to that it's possible to get some great regression analysis. --Spangineerws (háblame) 02:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[User:DavidCBryant]]'s comments from the last study

message: I second DavidCBryant's concern about focusing on any particular month. I just read the other day that the summer is a period of doldrums on Wikipedia, for example.
I second Reywas92's concern about the small sample size of acts of vandalism. While the number of 100 articles is itself small, the number of 32 vandalism edits definitely means that the conclusions regarding the authors of those edits (IP vs. registered) were invalid.
Perhaps Wikipedians knowledgeable about statistics can help ensure that your next study will be devoid of these deficiencies, because your efforts are definitely needed, and I don't want to see anyone's time wasted, especially when the topic is of such high importance. Thanks a lot, guys. Xiner (talk, email) 03:03, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[User:Xiner]]'s comments from the last study

message: i was thinking that the Scientific method is something we should start following for study 2, seeing as how the structure has been tried and true. it also makes for a better understanding in where all the data is going - study 1 was kind of a data-before-the-study kind of deal, and i think this one should be more formal and easier to read in a intro/hypothesis/data/results/conclusion kind of way. how do others feel? JoeSmack Talk 04:05, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  structure 

message: With Study2 wrapped up, let's look ahead.  Actually the following could be part of Study2:  
:What's the effect of semiprotect on the rate of non-vandal-or-revert Edits?   
In favor of an increase in that rate, registered users might be encouraged to do less reverting (since say 95 percent of vandalous Edits are by unregistered usere) leaving more time for non-revert Edits.  In favor of a decrease in that rate is that non-registered users would be blocked from any Edits with semi-protect.  I'd guess that if the percentage of  Edits by registered users is high, you'd get one result and vice versa, so that percentage would be a good control variable (an additional independent variable in the regression analysis). --Thomasmeeks 00:58, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean you'd like to make this Study 3 leaving study 2 here to recent-changes vandalism approach? Either way I think it sounds like a terrific subject for a study - count me in.  JoeSmack Talk 02:25, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't know about recent-changes vandalism approach.  I was trying to be facetious (as to "Study3").  But I am serious about the substance of this section.  It's a real drain in energy and time to deal with vandalism or bad Edits, overwhelmingly from unregistered users, which Study2 Study1 has persuasively documented.  Further documenting the effects, whatever they are, of registered vs. non-registered users bad Edits I hope could suggest constructive action.  --Thomasmeeks 12:35, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ahh, I think you mean Study 1 has documented, there is the confusion. You already have my vote as noted above; I agree. You should start setting up your procedure! :) JoeSmack Talk 12:50, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Your correction is noted above.  (Yes, and I do I sometimes miss the obvious;)  I'm assuming by procedure you mean nitty gritty details to make it work.  Someone looking at the above could do that as well or better than me (recruited for example through a Help Desk or on this page).  I'd do what I could as a resource person, but I feel overwhelmed by other matters.  One way of getting focus might be to concentrate on 1-month-before and 1-month-after date of semi-protect.  There are archived records of semi-protect requests granted through Wikipedia:Requests for page protection (assuming it lasted at least a full month).  The sample selection there would already be skewed toward high bad/good Edits ratio for articles getting semi-protect, but that's where bad Edits sre likely to be most serious and where effects of semiprotect on the number registered and unregistered usere would be available from the article history).  If there was a way of accessing semi-protects by category (social science, religion, etc.), then the above regression framework might be feasible. Otherwise, simple before and after comparisons without  categories might be a default.  Suppose someone with a few keystrokes could access all 2006 articles  granted semi-protect and with a few more keystroke restricted by their categories (social science, etc.), say by a find-on-this-page search. From that, one could narrow the pool of articles by category.  If that is not possible, then simple before-and-after semi-protect comparisons could still be very interesting.  --Thomasmeeks 14:24, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Study3?

message: I'd be interested to know what sort of relationship there is between how many edits a page gets in a certain amount of time and what percentage of those edits are vandalism. For this study, using random article to find lesser-viewed articles might be appropriate, but more popular pages would also have to be selected, perhaps an article from the list of most-frequently vandalized pages. If I had to guess, I'd say that the graph of percentage of edits that were vandalism, as compared to useful edits, vs. page popularity would be exponential, and the graph of percentage of edits that were vandalism, as compared to total edits, vs. page popularity would be logarithmic, but that's just a hypothesis. Feel free to drop me a line on my talk page if you'd like my help with anything, I love numbers. shoy 16:00, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This sounds something like the Obama article study. Popular page, freq. vandalized, comparing useful edits to vandalism ones. You might use that one as an extreme and a lessor know one as another and use those two as a pilot and see how you'd like to approach this more specifically. Interested? JoeSmack Talk 05:02, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I could use some of the data from your first study as well. shoy 16:59, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Correlate page popularity with amount of vandalism

message: You guys did a terrific job on Study 1.  I'm not sure how you divide up the duties, but when you have settled on a method for Study 2, please feel free to drop me a message assigning me a task (e.g., Data Points 20 - 30).  Would love to be some small help, as time permits.  Jonathan Stokes 04:30, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Absolutely! We'll rouse you for tasks, and of course value any input before and after tasks too. :) JoeSmack Talk 05:10, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have much input on your methodology...I'm happy to be a workerbee.  FYI, I just blogged your first study, hopefully with all appropriate credits and disclaimers.  Tomorrow, I expect this should get picked up in this Wikipedia blog aggregator and this one, too.  My hope is to help you draw attention and volunteers to the project.  You're doing impressive work here, and it deserves recognition.  Jonathan Stokes 05:56, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the praise.  Your volunteering made me realize that we should probably set up a volunteer section so I have done that below. Remember 12:40, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

text: We should also do what we can to make it really easy to volunteer.  We should put together tasks that are very specific, with detailed instructions of how to do it.  The way I envision the random edit study is that we'll pull our list of random edits, put them here, and then have each edit as a specific task that we're looking for someone to complete.  That coupled with good instructions, should make it fairly easy for casual interested people to take a few swings with the proverbial axe.  The reason this is important is that the strength of our study will have a lot to do with the amount of data we've collected.  We've got to think in terms of numbers far greater than ourselves.  A volunteer drive of sorts.  Martschink 03:52, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Volunteering

message: Please place you name here if you are willing to help us gather or analyze data for our next study:
* Remember 12:38, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Volunteers section

message: I've started this section to put together the possible data to collect for each given edit.  This assumes we do a random edit study.  What data can we collect to help make the study a robust source of data?  With more data, we can possibly add more to the sum of knowledge about vandalism beyond just the anonymous/registered distinction.  Some of these have been mentioned above, but I thought this was important enough to collect together under its own section.  And this is far from complete.  These aren't even specific proposals, just thoughts.  Dig it?  Please feel free to add.  For each edit:
* article length
* number of wikipedia links to the article 
* number of edits to the article within 7 days (or some time period) of the edit
* time between chosen edit and immediately preceding and following edit
* number of categories the article falls under
* edit date and time
* article age
* was article protected within previous N days?
* was article protected within subsequent N days? Martschink 22:57, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Data to collect for random edit study

message: Alright, as it looks like the Random Edits study one the vote above by 2:1 (see above), lets get the blueprints laid out. I was thinking this time we should follow a breakdown using the scientific method. Let's start filling in areas we can and set things up to start work. (omitted until work is done: Abstract, Data, Results and Discussion, Conclusion, References). JoeSmack Talk 20:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I went ahead and added this to the main page.  I think we can start working on stuff there now unless anyone objects. Remember 16:45, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I was WP:BOLD myself and proposed an outline procedure.  Make any changes and comments as need, including scrapping the whole thing.  This is just one idea. --Jayron32|talk|contribs 17:51, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Some have talked about a recent changes study, but I think the consensus was to get a truely random sampling we need to look at randomly selected edits (which would be selected by a number gneerator and then going straight to that edit).  So I have moved your suggestions to below for further comments. Any other feelings? Remember 18:19, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My understanding is that we're going to go forward with the random edit study, not the recent changes version.  That said, I'd like to see the scope of this study to be massive.  We need to look at far more edits than we will be able to look at ourselves.  I think we should proceed by (1) Figuring out what data we want to look at for each edit.  See the working list above.  (2) Spelling out a step-by-step procedure for examining an edit.  This way we can easily harness the work of new volunteers. (3) Generating the list of random edit numbers that we need data for.  (4) Start filling in the data.  I've talked this over with another contributor, so I'm going to make to further specific proposals.  First, that we examine 5000 edits.  That sounds like a huge number, but it will give the study credibility and attention.  That, coupled with a significant amount of information about each edit will also make this study useful.  Economist dig massive amounts of information, and our study can help provide that (along with whatever our initial conclusions are).  Which leads me to my second proposal, that we collect the data into a comma separated value (CSV) chart.  CSV is a common denominator for spreadsheets and databases and will make it easy to load for sophisticated analysis.  I believe that is the way to add additional value to the study. Martschink 00:29, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Random Edits study, formulation and structure 

message: I posted the following on the Village Pump and recieved the following reply Remember 19:52, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You might be able to get the content of two revisions, calculate their length, and then subtract the two values. Using api.php for this seems best, since it's quick. For example, take the following function in JavaScript, which returns the change in size between revisions using Ajax in Firefox (I should learn another programming language for doing this rather soon):
var XMLobj;
var XMLdoc;
var diffNum;
function getNumDiff(title, crevid) {
  try {
    XMLobj = sajax_init_object();
    XMLobj.overrideMimeType('text/xml');
    XMLobj.onreadystatechange = getDiffContent;
    XMLobj.open('GET', wgServer + wgScriptPath + '/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=xml&rvlimit=2' + '&rvstartid=' + crevid + '&titles=' + encodeURIComponent(title), true);
   XMLobj.send(null);
   } catch(anError) {}
}
function getDiffContent() {
  if (XMLobj.readyState != 4) {
    return;
  }
  if(XMLobj.status != 200) {
    alert ('There was an error.');
    return;
  }
  var XMLdoc = XMLobj.responseXML.documentElement;
  if(!XMLdoc) {
  return;
  }
  alert(getRvData(XMLdoc.getElementsByTagName('rev')[0]).length - getRvData(XMLdoc.getElementsByTagName('rev')[1]).length);
}
function getRvData(rvObj) {
  var rvNodes =  rvObj.childNodes;
  var rvString = ;
    for (nodes in rvNodes) {
      rvString += rvNodes[nodes].nodeValue || ;
    }
  return rvString;
}
Then try, say, getNumDiff('Kitten', 122843426). This alerts the difference in revision size—in this case, 39 characters—in .25 seconds. There is probably a better way of doing it... an actual programming language may be an option. Then there's always wget. GracenotesT § 04:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

text: For the first question, you could wait until revision 20221 of MediaWiki is activated on Wikimedia Foundation wikis which will add the number of bytes add/removed to all edits in article histories. However this requires an update of all the rows containing edit information (over 127,000,000 on the English Wikipedia alone at time of writing), so it hasn't been activated yet. Graham87 12:00, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See special:version for the current revision number. Graham87 12:01, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questions for Vandalism study 

message: We are working on conducting our second vandalism study here Wikipedia:WikiProject Vandalism studies/Study2, and I had some technical questions that I thought someone here could help us with.  Is there anyway to determine the amount of data added or subtracted from an article from a specific edit? I know that this is displayed on the recent changes page, but can you get that information for any edit?  Also is there any way to easily measure the size of an article at a specific point in its history? If anybody has any expertise in these areas please let me know. Remember 02:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You might be able to get the content of two revisions, calculate their length, and then subtract the two values. Using api.php for this seems best, since it's quick. For example, take the following function in JavaScript, which returns the change in size between revisions using Ajax in Firefox (I should learn another programming language for doing this rather soon):
var XMLobj;
var XMLdoc;
var diffNum;
function getNumDiff(title, crevid) {
  try {
    XMLobj = sajax_init_object();
    XMLobj.overrideMimeType('text/xml');
    XMLobj.onreadystatechange = getDiffContent;
    XMLobj.open('GET', wgServer + wgScriptPath + '/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=xml&rvlimit=2' + '&rvstartid=' + crevid + '&titles=' + encodeURIComponent(title), true);
   XMLobj.send(null);
   } catch(anError) {}
}
function getDiffContent() {
  if (XMLobj.readyState != 4) {
    return;
  }
  if(XMLobj.status != 200) {
    alert ('There was an error.');
    return;
  }
  var XMLdoc = XMLobj.responseXML.documentElement;
  if(!XMLdoc) {
  return;
  }
  alert(getRvData(XMLdoc.getElementsByTagName('rev')[0]).length - getRvData(XMLdoc.getElementsByTagName('rev')[1]).length);
}
function getRvData(rvObj) {
  var rvNodes =  rvObj.childNodes;
  var rvString = ;
    for (nodes in rvNodes) {
      rvString += rvNodes[nodes].nodeValue || ;
    }
  return rvString;
}
Then try, say, getNumDiff('Kitten', 122843426). This alerts the difference in revision size—in this case, 39 characters—in .25 seconds. There is probably a better way of doing it... an actual programming language may be an option. Then there's always wget. GracenotesT § 04:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

text: For the first question, you could wait until revision 20221 of MediaWiki is activated on Wikimedia Foundation wikis which will add the number of bytes add/removed to all edits in article histories. However this requires an update of all the rows containing edit information (over 127,000,000 on the English Wikipedia alone at time of writing), so it hasn't been activated yet. Graham87 12:00, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See special:version for the current revision number. Graham87 12:01, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Village Pump posting