Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism Unit/Vandalism studies

“

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.

”

— Wikipedia:Vandalism

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Contents
Contents 1 Studies 2 Members 3 Open tasks 4 Research questions 5 Wikipedia vandalism studies outside of this project 5.1 Published 5.2 Wikipedia 5.3 Coverage of the WikiProject's studies 6 Resources 7 Show Your Pride! 8 Categories

The Vandalism Studies project is a portion of the Counter-Vandalism Unit designated to conduct research related to unconstructive edits on Wikipedia. The project covers all vandalism on Wikipedia. If you'd like to get involved, please add your name to the Members list, below!

Studies

_{(in reverse chronological order)}

Study	Status
Study 3 (suggest ideas)	Discussion ongoing... , but planned for November
Obama article study (talk page)	N Stale
Study 2 (talk page)	N Not done and not likely to be done
Study 1 (talk page)	Done

Members

Please add your name to the bottom of the list if you would like to be involved in the Vandalism Studies!
_{(This will also add you to our talk page mailing list - if you don't want to receive messages, please say so!)}

Theopolisme (talk · contribs) - CVUA Co-coordinator
Chip123456 (talk · contribs) - CVUA instructor
Riley Huntley (talk · contribs) - CVUA instructor and SWMT member
West.andrew.g (talk · contribs) STiki developer; academic research on anti-vandalism
Matthewrbowker (talk · contribs) Willing to help
Aetheling (talk · contribs) Planning to replicate and extend my earlier research.
Remember (talk · contribs) Glad to see that someone is resurrecting this project. Not sure if I have a lot of time to help, but I will do what I can.
Djjazzyb (talk · contribs) Willing to do anything I can to help out.
MJ94 (talk · contribs) I'll help in any way possible.
Achowat (talk · contribs)
Jayemd (talk · contribs)
Zhaofeng Li (talk · contribs) I'll try my best to help.
Activism1234 (talk · contribs) - recently joined the unit
Coolg863 (talk · contribs) I would like to help out however I can.
This lousy T-shirt (talk · contribs) You might need the help and insight that I can provide. :)
Adamstraw99 (talk · contribs) want to join
Zaldax (talk · contribs) I wouldn't mind helping out.
Uploadvirus (talk · contribs) Research ... YUMMY!
Ace of Spades (talk · contribs)
Ásvaldr Petia Viator Dara (talk · contribs)
Anti-Quasar (talk · contribs) I would like to help out that I can...
Arun sharma 101 (talk · contribs) I will be happy if I can do something
Harsh_2580 (talk · contribs) want to join :)
Electriccatfish2 (talk · contribs)
Thomas85753 (talk · contribs) I'll help in any way I can! I would not like to receive messages.
Torreslfchero (talk · contribs)
Egeymi (talk · contribs) I would to join
Mdann52 (talk · contribs) CVUA instructor
Joeyjimenez (talk · contribs) I would like to join
Juristicweb (talk · contribs) I'd like to join
Cyrax Cyborg (talk · contribs) I love to combat vandalism
Ioscat (talk · contribs) Used to create pointless pages, wish I never had. Wan't to help out now and stop vandals and trolls :)
Mojoworker (talk · contribs)
Altaïr (talk · contribs) Of course, it's gonna benefit Wikipedia in the end. Happy to sign up.
Stausifr (talk · contribs)
AdventurousSquirrel (talk · contribs) I've been working to combat vandalism where I can for a while now so it makes sense to join on here.
Cskcsk (talk · contribs) Count me in!
AlexJFox (talk · contribs) I'm in!
Vertium (talk · contribs) Sounds like fun!
{{User|xtraelv)

Open tasks

Begin formulating ideas and topics to research for "Study 3" (discuss now!)
Discuss what research needs to be conducted and what would be good metrics to gather.
Add thoughts/contribute to any of the completed studies. (Study 1, Study 2, Obama article study)

Research questions

These are some preliminary questions may stimulate future studies. Not all questions may be answerable, so think of it more as a brainstorming section.

Analysis of vandalism Who is responsible for vandalism? What do vandals want? What are the demographics of the vandal population? What proportion of vandals are on dynamic IP addresses, and hence very hard to block? Are IP edits ever responsible to improving a featured article while on the Main Page? (See also essay IPs are human too.) What motivates people to vandalize articles? How can we minimize the satisfaction they get from doing it? (See: The motivation of a vandal) Do vandals just choose another article to edit instead if an article is semi-protected? How can we test this? Why do certain articles attract more vandalism than others? What types of vandalism are there? What message are they trying to get across? Why do vandals not fully realise that their actions are futile? What sort of financial gains can be made from using Wikipedia to advertise - are spammers just wasting their time, or can it actually be profitable? Are our anti-spam measures adequate? What is the overall contribution from schools and universities? Are they worth having? Do universities contribute less vandalism than schools, or are all ages equally immature? How does the rate of vandalism vary throughout the day? Would still be problems with vandalism if unregistered editing were blocked? How can we test this hypothesis? Certain categories could be experimentally altered to block unregistered editors, but then vandals could just choose an article that wasn't protected. We would have to block all IP editing, which would certainly be controversial, even just to gather a small sample of data. The blocks would also have to allow newly registered users to edit, otherwise there wouldn't be time to create an account and then wait 4 days. Perhaps we could use a comparative method by doing the experiments on another wiki instead? Quantitatively, how are levels of vandalism affected (both in terms of percentage of edits and number of edits) when there is external attention draw to an article (e.g. Slashdot or The Colbert Report). Do levels of vandalism return to normal (e.g. in elephant) in all cases? How quickly? How much of vandalism is self-reverted? How do the levels of reverted edits compare between articles of different quality (e.g. GA vs. start class) How often are good faith edits labeled as vandalism, either a) mistakenly and through misinterpretation of policy or b) maliciously?

Impact How long does vandalism typically remain visible? What level of vandalism is considered acceptable before semi-protection or some other measure is needed? How should the 'level of vandalism' be measured? (See:A more explicit semi-protection policy for articles subject to vandalism) What impact does vandalism have on the reputation of Wikipedia? How often are good faith editors driven away after getting mislabeled as vandals? How often are good faith editors driven away because an article is vandalized? How much time do editors waste cleaning up vandalism?

Counter measures How effective are bots in curtailing vandalism? Warnings: Are editors any more likely to continue or desist vandalizing if warned by a bot instead of a person? How often are vandals warned on their talk page after committing an offense? What are the costs and benefits, and hence overall utility, of warning users? How do users respond to warnings? Who is responsible for reverting vandalism? What effects does semi-protection have on the level of vandalism of protected articles? What strategies can we employ to catch vandalism quickly? How can we catch most of it at recent changes? How can we establish a situation where almost every article has someone responsible for maintaining it? Is this even a good idea? (See: Ownership of articles) How good are editors at reverting vandalism? That is, is it reverted properly, or is it often dealt with poorly, e.g. removing a whole paragraph that the vandal has simply altered in meaning. What happens to vandalism levels when edits won't show up in the current version of the article - a trial of something like stable versions, where the vandal cannot vandalize the actual article people see, or something functionally similar, is needed. Perhaps a small section (e.g. all articles in a certain category) could be tested out. How well do flagged revisions work in practice?

Wikipedia vandalism studies outside of this project

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Published

"U of M researchers reveal new findings about Wikipedia authorship and vandalism" (Press release). University of Minnesota - Department of Computer Science and Engineering. 2007-11-6. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
Buriol, Luciana S. (2006). "Temporal Analysis of the Wikigraph" (PDF). Sapienza University of Rome. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
GroupLens Research (November 4–7, 2007). Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia (PDF). Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: University of Minnesota - Department of Computer Science and Engineering.{{cite conference}}: CS1 maint: date format (link)
MIT Media Lab (April 24–29, 2004). "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" (PDF). Vienna: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Moore, Rick (2007-11-16). "New information on Wikipedia". University of Minnesota.
"Wikipedia Vandal Study - US Senate: Oct 1 - Dec 31, 2007". Google Docs. January 2008.
Smets, Koen (2008). "Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia: Towards a Machine Learning Approach" (PDF). University of Antwerp - Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Wang, William Yang (2010). "Got You!: Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia with Web-based Shallow Syntactic-Semantic Modeling" (PDF). the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Belani, Amit (2010-1-5). "Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia: a Bag-of-Words Classifier Approach" (PDF). arXiv. Cornell University. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
West, Andrew G. (2010). "Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism via Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Adler, B. Thomas (2011). "Wikipedia Vandalism Detection: Combining Natural Language, Metadata, and Reputation Features". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
West, Andrew G. (2011). "Multilingual Vandalism Detection using Language-Independent & Ex Post Facto Evidence". {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

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Wikipedia

Wikipedia: Don't protect Main Page featured articles/December Main Page FA analysis (2006-12-8)
Wikipedia: Study of article statistics by Opabinia regalis (2007-2-18)
Wikipedia: Study of the ratio of IP-based vandalism to signed in user vandalism by Cool3 (2006-10-2)
Wikipedia: Study of vandalism on individual's user page by Angela (2007-3-29)
Wikipedia: Study of vandalism to featured articles by Colonel Chaos (2007-5-1)
Wikipedia: Study of vandalism survival times (2009-6-22)
Wikipedia: Vandalism statistics by Dragons flight (2009-8-20)
Wikipedia: Village pump (policy) - What will it take to ban unregistered editors?: alternative interpretation of your data by Jayron32 (2007-3-17)

Coverage of the WikiProject's studies

Coverage of first study:

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Resources

Vandalism
Cleaning up vandalism
Administrator intervention against vandalism
IPs are human too - various data, including some on assumption of vandalism/disruption
Long-term abuse
Most vandalized pages
Recent changes patrol
The motivation of a vandal
Vandalism won by 2009
User:Dragons flight/Log analysis - various data, including some on vandalism.
User:Fred Bauder/Error management