Wikipedia:Pending changes/Metrics/Anonymous edit quality

Below are page editing metrics generated August 6, 2010 on the Pending Changes feature, based on all articles that were (at some point) under Pending changes as of approximately August 2, 2010.

The table shows 1,628 articles, of which 1,313 (80.6%) received at least one edit by an unregistered editor while under pending changes. This represents a total of 53,547 article-days under the system, with a mean of 32.9 article-days per article for all articles, and a mean of 40.8 article-days for articles that were edited by an unregistered editor. Articles that were in the PC system for shorter periods of time (sometimes less than one hour) were least likely to be edited during that time by an unregistered user.

Among articles that were edited by at least one unregistered user while in the PC system, articles received a mean of 6.8 good (accepted) edits and 14.8 bad (rejected) edits. All together, this represents 8,920 good edits (32%) accepted by reviewers and 18,973 bad edits (68%) that were rejected and thus never displayed to any reader.

Articles in the PC system during the trial were required to qualify for semi-protection, and many of these articles were chosen for the PC trial specifically because they had been under semi-protection for several years. Semi-protected articles receive zero edits, good or bad, by unregistered users. Placing these articles in the trial downgraded the protection level to permit unregistered users to edit the articles, albeit with a delay for review before the change is shown to the world. The selection criteria for the trial therefore prevents comparisons between 'unprotected' and 'PC' states, but shows that compared to semi-protection, articles in the PC system received thousands of constructive edits, and twice as many non-constructive edits.