Wikipedia talk:Counter-Vandalism Unit/Vandalism studies/Study2

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: Drawing on the above list, here is a more official proposal of the data the study should collect for each edit, along with an explanation of why it might be worth collecting, as well as challenges that may need to be overcome to collect it.  Please keep in mind that for every item of data, we're looking for whatever it was at the time of the edit, not as it is now.  Generally speaking, the information will fall into four categories: (1) Edit, (2) Editor, (3) Reversion, (4) Article, and (5) Housekeeping.  For purposes of aesthetics, it might be preferable to move where the data are positioned in the collection table relative to each other, but that can be addressed later.
EDIT
* Edit Number. The randomly chosen edit number to which all of the following data relates.
* Edit Date. The date and time the edit was made.  We need to use a standard clock for this, such as GMT, and I'm not sure if this is going to be a problem.  
* Edit Type. This is the data to indicate whether the edit is vandalism and what type.:
** NV Not Vandalism
** OV Obvious Vandalism
** POV Point of View
** DV Deletion Vandalism
** LS Linkspam
* Text Character Change. This is intended to reflect how much the edit changed the article.  I know the recent changes link gives a number for each recent change that indicates how much data was added or removed from the article.  I'm not sure how easily we can do the same when we're looking at randomly chosen edits.  Any ideas?  Can this be done by a bot?  Also, should it measure text characters or bytes?  What is the easiest and most meaningful?
* Date of Ten Edits Before. This and the next point are meant to give a rough measure of the popularity of the article (so maybe it really belongs under the article category).  Essentially, if you're gathering data for edit #46, this ask for the date and time of edit #36, thus providing a measure of how long it took for the article to be edited 10 times.
* Date of Ten Edits Later. Just like the previous, except it would be the date and time of edit # 56.  This will also be interesting for comparing reversion and edit rate.
EDITOR INFO
* Editor Type. Whether the person who made the edit being studied was anonymous or registered.  There has been a suggestion that we should further differentiate this point, and I tend to agree.  Any suggestions as to how?
* Editor Login Name.
* Number of Edits. This should be the number of edits the editor has made at the time of the edit in question.  This is not that users current number of edits.  I'm not sure what the best way to collect this is.  Is this a bot job?
* Date of First Edit. This indicates how long the editor has been involved on our fine encyclopedia.  It shouldn't be too hard to collect.  This combined with the previous data point should provide somewhat interesting info about the editor's average rate of edits up to that point.
REVERSION INFO
* Reversion Edit Numnber. The edit number for the reversion.
* Reversion Date.  Date and time of the reversion.
* Reverter Type.  Registered, Anonymous, Bot.  Should we further subdivide?
* Reverter Login Name.
ARTICLE
* Length/Size. What we need here is some sort of indication of the length or size of the article at the time of the edit in question.  Does anyone know how that can be easily figured out?  This would be a very useful piece of information.
* Number of Categories. This is the number of categories the article fell under at the time of the edit being examined (not current number of categories).  
* Number of Links to.  The number of wikipedia links to the article at the time of the edit.  This would be a very important piece of information, but I'm not sure how to gather it.  The "What Links Here" button doesn't work because under our random edit method, that just shows what links to the index page.  And we can't do it by looking at a current version of the article, because what we want to know was how linked in was the article at the time of the edit/vandalism.  Does anyone know how we can do this?
* Creation Date.  The date and time the article was created.  Merges and moved articles may make this more difficult than it would seem at first.  
HOUSEKEEPING
* Login of Data Collector.  The login of the wonderful person who collected the info.
* Date of Collection. Date and time the data was collected.
Martschink 04:53, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Data to Collect (Redux) 

message: Can we list the analysis we want to perform in one place.  It can help to make sure we gather critical data to do the analysis.  Also doing prelimary tests of the analysis will help to gauge if sample size is sufficient for each issue measured and tell if more data needs to be gathered. Some I would add
*Assess portion of editors using bots against vandalism (to see what kinds and number vandalism edits arent fixed with bots yet.also theoretical that an automated bot can fix some kinds without any user intervention)
*Assess proportion of vandal editors who become contributors later (probably limited because cant tie later enrolled memberships to original IPs)
*Categories of articles which are most vandalized-example political or celebrity. Venado 17:13, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Analysis of data

message: I have all the data collected (right now, 1000 edits... I can pull about 2,000 a night) in an sql database. I've posted the first 100 to Wikipedia:WikiProject Vandalism studies/Study2/Dataset 1 as a sortable wikitable broken up into sections of 10.
The upside to this is it can be edited by section to prevent conflicts and make it easier to keep from being lost in the little edit box. The downside is that it makes having a sortable table almost useless.
I'm just fishing for thoughts on how we should break this up. The most technically optimal method would be to have a DB on a server that everyone can get into and edit one row at a time. Is it perhaps best to create a web interface for this project? --Auto(talk / contribs) 00:04, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I did the ultimate test and tried editing the table manually to update... hell no. I requested an account on the toolserver, and I'll write up a quick & dirty php form when I get access. Suddenly makes me wish WP had an OpenID kind of system... --Auto(talk / contribs) 16:32, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Sounds good to me.  Set it up. Remember 16:40, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

text: Yeah, the last thing we want to do is make this process needlessly painful. Thanks for all the hard work Autocracy. JoeSmack Talk 16:46, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

text: This is great-I think the sections can be a lot bigger than 10 if that is easier.  These first 100 are for edits in 2006.  Arent we looking at May 2007 in this study?  Should the dataset be filtered before it is split to leave the main article edits?  It might be best to have the whole set ready and do some numbers like number of talk edits, user page edits, user talk edits, image edits, things like that which can be done without coding on our part.  Then we can separate groups of just article edits for further evaluation.Venado 20:40, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: We were looking at May 2007 because some people thought a change in the Wikimedia software would provide us with more data, but that change is superficial, and we could retrieve it for the older data. When I get on the toolserver, I'll write up a PHP interface for us to process the data. Autocracy 20:50, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks.  I would think this didn't impact the required sample size we estimated earlier.  With the unfiltered sections set up earlier I was easily able to work 50 edits or so in an hour even though I was going slow and doing it just to help brainstorm ideas.Venado 23:48, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Splitting up work