Study of vandalism survival times
- 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.
This study has a narrow focus: to determine the distribution of the length of time that vandalism remains on the English-language Wikipedia. This distribution is also known as the survival function for 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.
In the past there have been other statistical studies, both formal and informal, of how long vandalism remains in Wikipedia until it is corrected, but almost all of them express their results as a mean time to correction (i.e., as a simple arithmetic average of the observed times). I will show in this study that the distribution function for time to correction has such a fat tail that the mean time to correction is both mathematically and substantively meaningless. The median time to correction, on the other hand, conveys useful information.