On 22 May 2011 19:58, Sarah <slimvir...@gmail.com> wrote: > The BLP problem is a very divisive one on the English Wikipedia, but > it's not entirely clear how grounded it is in fact. Sometimes we're > told OTRS is overwhelmed by the number of BLP complaints, but no > figures are given. > > Some hard stats -- X number of complaints concerning Y number of > articles within time T, of which Z were actionable -- would be very > useful.
Some figures Amory Meltzer and I came up with in 2010: In a single week in late 2009, we got an average of 40-50 active tickets per day - not spam, not people thinking we were someone else, etc. 15% of those were about BLP issues. If we look *only* at tickets about specific article issues (removing the general WP/WMF-related enquiries and "normal" vandalism reports), BLP tickets made up 30% of the traffic. Making an estimate for recurring cases, this suggests we get contacted regarding 2,000 to 2,500 BLP issues per year. I don't have any figures on actionability, I'm afraid, but it's an intriguing question... The vast majority of these were regarding one specific BLP article; a couple were BLP issues on non-BLP articles, usually companies and towns. All told, BLP articles proportionally generated about two to three times more issues than other content. The interesting aspect here is that two-thirds of BLP issues are reported by the subject, or by someone close to or involved with the subject (a relative, colleague, agent, etc). If we look *only* at third-party reports, BLPs seem to generate about as much traffic as any other content. The same held for looking solely at "normal" vandalism reports - 15%. Read what you will into that one... my personal interpretation is that BLP failings were more likely to be seen and more likely to cause some kind of real or perceived harm, leading to a greater response rate. >From the *workload* perspective, however, whilst BLPs only make up ~15% of traffic, they take up substantially more time and effort. My initial estimate was that they take up at least half the editor-hours put into handling OTRS tickets; it would be hard to quantify this without some fairly detailed surveys, but it feels right. Writing to someone involved with the issue personally is always more complicated, especially if they're - justifiably - angry or worried about the situation. The problems are often quite complex, so can sit longer while people consider how to approach the issue, and are more likely to involve (long-term) onwiki followup, or require multiple rounds of correspondence. As a result, I suspect my 30% of "article issues" and Christine's 45% are closer than they might seem - there's an unusually large backlog of tickets this past month, compared to the situation a few months ago, and so a count based on "still open" will suggest more of them than actually come in on a daily basis. Regarding a separate BLP queue, we found that a significant number of tickets get handled in the "wrong" queues, because it's often simpler for someone to respond to the email wherever it's come in rather than move the ticket and then respond to it. Which is perfectly fine, of course - a response goes out and everyone's happy - but it does mean that the response data categorised by queue is often fairly inaccurate. For meaningful data on any particular class of tickets, you'd probably have to sample. Apologies for the length, but hopefully that's of some use! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
