You shall not publish: Edit filters on EN Wikipedia
HCC Research Group Meeting June 2019
Lusy
Source: Halfaker et al. "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline"
Overview
- Motivation
- State of the literature/Literature: What does the scientific community know
- Documentation: What is an edit filter and why was it introduced according to Wikipedia's/MediaWiki pages?
- Data Analysis: Edit filters on English Wikipedia
- Open questions
Motivation
- What is the role of filters among existing (algorithmic) quality-control mechanisms (bots, semi-automated tools, ORES, humans)? Which type of tasks do filters take over?
- How have these tasks evolved over time (are they changes in the type, number, etc.)?
- What are suitable areas of application for rule-based systems such as filters in contrast to the other ML-based approaches?
State of the Literature
- One thing is ostentatiously missing: edit filters
What is an edit filter
- MediaWiki extension
- regex based filtering of edits and other actions (e.g. account creation, page deletion or move, upload)
- triggers before an edit is published
- different actions can be defined
Motivations for its introduction
- disallow certain types of obvious pervasive (perhaps automated) vandalism directly
- takes more than a single click to revert
- human editors can use their time more productively elsewhere
Edit filters in the quality control mechanisms frame
- the question of infrastructure
- guidelines say: for in-depth checks and problems with a particular article bots are better (don't use up resources)
- they were introduced before the ml tools came around.
- they probably work, so no one sees a reason to shut them down
- hypothesis: Wikipedia is a diy project driven by volunteers; they work on whatever they like to work
- hypothesis: it is easier to understand what's going on than it is with a ML tool. people like to use them for simplicity and transparency reasons
- hypothesis: it is easier to set up a filter than program a bot. Setting up a filter requires "only" understanding of regular expressions. Programming a bot requires knowledge of a programming language and understanding of the API.
Data Analysis: Edit Filters on EN Wikipedia
What do most active filters do?
135 repeating characters & tag, warn
30 "large deletion from article by new editors" & tag, warn
61 "new user removing references" & tag
18 "test type edits from clicking on edit bar" & deleted in Feb 2012
3 "new user blanking articles" & tag, warn
Descriptive statistics
all filters: 954
public filters: 361
Active public filters: 110
disabled (but not deleted) public filters: 35
deleted public filters: 216
hidden filters: 593
active hidden filters: 91
disabled (but not deleted) hidden filters: 118
deleted hidden filters: 384
Number of filter hits per month March 2009-March 2019
Filters Actions
Active Public Filters Actions
Active Hidden Filters Actions
Manual classification
vandalism, good faith and maintenance
- difficult to distinguish
- a lot of subcategories
Vandalism
id hits public comment
46 356945 "Poop" vandalism
365 85470 Unusual changes to featured or good content
16 2005 Prolific socker I
Good Faith
id hits public comment
180 175939 Large unwikified new article
98 39401 Creating very short new article
maintenance
id hits public comment
577 1566 VisualEditor bugs: Strange icons
345 13832 Extraneous formatting from browser extension
942 1573 Log edits to protected pages
Current Limitations
- Only EN Wikipedia
- manual filter classification only conducted by me
