Hi Amir, This is one of those areas of research where we really need the annual editor survey. I think it ran once after the 2009/10 Strategy process, and I don't know if the best questions got included.
But the best time to ask editors what prompted them to start editing has to be fairly soon after they started as memories fade. I once went back to my early edits and the edit I remembered starting me editing barely made it into my first 50. There is a longstanding theory that a lot of new editors start or started to fix some vandalism that they saw, and that this group went into steep decline a decade ago with the rise of Cluebot and other antivandalism tools that work faster than a newbie could. But without an annual survey to ask editors what prompted them to edit you are going to struggle to research this. Of course you could look at the early logged in edits of active/prolific wikipedians, but if it is true that many/most Wikipedians start with some IP edits, the earliest edits of many Wikipedians won't be available. Abuse one assumes has a differential effect on the targets of abuse, disproportionately women, gays and ethnic minorities. But I'd be inclined to look at stuff targeted at their user and usertalkpages rather than talkpages and edit summaries, though an email survey of former editors would be useful. My suspicion is that when we revert, block and maybe even revdel or oversight abuse we assume that fixes the problem, and if we want to tackle abuse we need more edit filters to prevent such abuse from going live. WSC On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 15:16, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > Hi, > > Is there any research about the effect of vandalism in wiki content pages > on readers, experienced editors, and new and potential editors? > > And of abuse in discussion pages and edit summaries on experienced editors > and new and potential editors? > > Intuitively and anecdotally one could think of the following: > 1. Vandalism in content pages (articles) wastes editors' and patrollers' > time. This (probably) doesn't require proof (or does it?). But some people > say it also causes some experienced editors to burn out and leave. Is there > any data about it, beyond intuition? > > 2. Does vandalism *measurably* affect the perception of the wikis' > reliability? (This may be wildly different in different languages and > wikis.) > > 3. Abusive language on discussion pages and edit summaries affects editors, > and may cause them to reduce their editing, to stop editing about certain > topics, or to leave the wiki entirely. Is this effect measurable? How does > it differ for various groups by gender, age, religion, country, > professional and educational background, seniority at the wiki, etc.? > > Thanks! :) > > -- > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > “We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
