Research:Portuguese Wikipedia trends and behavior/Reverts and Deletions Background

Background edit

Research on English Wikipedia has shown that reverts have an impact on new editor retention, and an anecdotal glance at PT:WP Recent Changes to User Talk often shows a lot of Huggle warnings. Reverts have also come up as a source of community discontent in BCP discussions. So, we chose to investigate reverts on PT:WP to answer some of the following questions:

Are vandal fighters becoming increasingly overworked? Are admins doing most of the work or are more reverts done by self-selected vandal-fighters with automated tools? Are there more reverts now than in the past? Who does this impact the most?

Below are some plots with preliminary results to address these questions.

Results edit

Reverts to new vs older editors edit

The percentage of all edits that get reverted is increasing each year, and it appears that the percentage of edits made by new editors shows the largest increase. While existing editors (more than 6 months editing PT:WP) have been reverted at a rate of 4-6% since 2008, new editors (less than 6 months editing PT:WP) have gone from 7% reverted in Jan 2008 to 16% in early 2011.

Most active reverters edit

Many editors help fight vandalism by reverting edits - bots, admins, Hugglers, and others. These groups are relatively constant over time.

Some groups do more reverts than others, however. Vandal-fighters using Huggle do a large share of the work. We are not yet able to filter users of Twinkle as a separate group, so Twinklers fall into the "other" category in these plots.

Huggler contributions edit

A closer look at the increase in vandal fighters using Huggle over time

This group of 100 editors (out of who make at least one edit to PT:WP per month) is small but highly active. Hugglers make up to 20% of all edits and add up to 25% of all megabytes of content. (Note: edits counted includes edits made by this group not using Huggle)