Overview

• Motivation and research questions
• Analysis sources
• Findings
• Directions for future studies

What is an edit filter

Motivation

Source: Halfaker et al. "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline"

Research questions

• Q1: What is the role of edit filters among existing algorithmic quality-control mechanisms on Wikipedia (bots, semi-automated tools, ORES)?
• Q2: Edit filters are a classical rule-based system. Why are they still active today when more sophisticated ML approaches exist?
• Q3: Which type of tasks do filters take over?
• Q4: How have these tasks evolved over time (are there changes in the type, number, etc.)?

Analysis Sources

• Literature
• Documentation
• Data

Q1: What is the role of edit filters among existing algorithmic quality-control mechanisms on Wikipedia (bots, semi-automated tools, ORES)?

• edit filters triggered before an edit is published
• disallow certain types of obvious, pervasive (perhaps automated), and difficult to remove vandalism directly
• can target malicious users directly without restricting everyone (<-> page protection)
• historically faster and more reliable, by being a direct part of the core software
• people fed up with bot governance

Q2: Edit filters are a classical rule-based system. Why are they still active today when more sophisticated ML approaches exist?

• introduced before most vandalism fighting ML systems came along
• rule-based systems are more transparent and accountable
• easier to work with
• allow for finer levels of control than ML: i.e. disallowing specific users
• allow more easily for collaboration

Q3: Which type of tasks do filters take over?

Q4: How have these tasks evolved over time (are there changes in the type, number, etc.)?

Data source: R.S. Geiger and A. Halfaker. 2017. Code and Datasets for: Operationalizing Conflict and Cooperation Between Automated Software Agents in Wikipedia. Figshare (2017). https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5362216

Directions for future studies

• Verify results
• What proportion of quality control work do filters take over?
• To implement a bot or to implement a filter?
• What are the repercussions on affected editors?
• What are the differences between how filters are governed on EN Wikipedia compared to other language versions?

Thank you!

These slides are licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License.

The project is available under: https://git.imp.fu-berlin.de/luvaseva/wikifilters

Questions? Comments? Thoughts?

There are 954 edit filters on EN Wikipedia: roughly 21% of them are active, 16% are disabled, and 63% are deleted