You Shall Not Publish: Edit Filters on English Wikipedia

Ensuring the quality of the content provided in online settings is an important challenge today, for example, for social media or news. The Wikipedia community has ensured the high-quality standards for an online encyclopaedia from the beginning and has built a sophisticated set of automated, semi-automated, and manual quality assurance mechanisms over the last fifteen years. The scientific community has systematically studied these mechanisms but one mechanism has been overlooked - edit filters. Edit filters are syntactic rules that assess incoming edits, file uploads or account creations. As opposed to many other quality assurance mechanisms, edit filters are effective before a new revision is stored in the online encyclopaedia. In the exploratory study presented, we describe the role of edit filters in Wikipedia's quality assurance system. We examine how edit filters work, describe how the community governs their creation and maintenance, and look into the tasks these filters take over. Our goal is to steer researchers' attention to this quality control mechanism by pointing out directions for future studies.