"It is important to be patient with newcomers, who will be unfamiliar with Wikipedia's culture and rules, but may nonetheless turn out to be valuable contributors. "
"Many new users who lack an intuitive grasp of Wikipedia customs are gradually brought around, once the logic behind these customs becomes clearer to them. "
User:Angela conducted a vandalism study on her own user page.
"Vandalism studies/Study1 found that almost all vandalism (97%) is made by unregistered users. Looking at vandalism on my own user page, I find a very different result. Almost half of the vandalism is made by registered users. "
This one is "Loren Cobb (User:Aetheling) holds a Ph.D. in mathematical sociology and is a research professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver."
studies the survival function of vandalism
The two primary results from this study are: (a) the median time to correction is down to four minutes, and (b) some subtle forms of vandalism still persist for months and even years.
suggest using median rather than mean time to correction
100 randomly selected articles
"All data collection occurred on 2009-06-11"
"
Results
Of the 100 articles, fully 75 had never been vandalized.
Of the 25 articles that were vandalized at least once, the most recent such instance of vandalism was eventually corrected in 23 articles.
In five (20%) of the vandalized articles, the most recent instance of vandalism was corrected in less than one minute. A further four instances were corrected in less than two minutes.
The median time to correction was four minutes.
Two articles were found to have suffered vandalism that was never corrected. One of these was a subtle act of vandalism that was committed on 2007-02-23, and still not detected by the date of the study, 2009-06-11.
