Wikimedia Apps/Short descriptions/Research

To understand how users of the Android app used this feature to contribute, and for an initial assessment of its effect on Wikidata content and on the workload of recent changes patrollers on Wikidata, we analyzed data from two sources: The (publicly available) edit history on Wikidata, and an EventLogging instrumentation (Schema:MobileWikiAppEdit). Below are the results from the former. The feature has been available in the alpha version of the app since late 2016 (and there were earlier test implementations, also on iOS). On February 10, 2017, it was enabled in the beta version on the Russian, Hebrew and Catalan Wikipedia, and on February 28 rolled out in the production release, still restricted to these three languages.

From the time of the language-limited beta rollout on February 10 until April 12, 5891 description edits were made using the app, by between 20 and 57 distinct users (including IPs) each day. 4.6% of these edits were reverted, which is higher than the rate for Wikidata description edits in general (e.g. 1.2% in the week from February 1 to February 7 2017, excluding edits by easily detectable bots and edits made via external tools such as Quickstatements or reCH). On the other hand, this revert rate is considerably lower than e.g. on the English Wikipedia (8.1% for all edits including bots, and 29.0% for anonymous edits, per data from November 2015). Here is a language-specific breakdown for the three languages that were enabled in the production version:

Some notes and caveats:
 * As always, it is important to note that not all reverted edits are vandalism.
 * Conversely (like for all Wikidata edits), not all vandalism may have been detected and reverted
 * Members of the Reading team (in particular Dmitry and Tilman) were monitoring the edits from the app frequently, to make sure the feature was not becoming too disruptive, and on that occasion reverted many vandalism edits themselves (in a volunteer capacity). This drove up the revert rate compared to the baseline of normal description edits that did not receive such extra scrutiny. Specifically, among the 4.6% of reverted edits, 1.4% were reverted by members of the Reading team.
 * The Wikipedia revert rates are useful for an informal comparison, which however needs be taken with various grains of salt (e.g.: the cited total revert rate for WP do not exclude bots and are thus likely lower, they cover all namespaces instead of just a particular content type, etc.).
 * Calculations and further details are available in a public PAWS notebook.