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Why Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much In Quality
Hugh Pickens writes "A new study shows that the patterns of collaboration among Wikipedia contributors directly affect the quality of an article. 'These collaboration patterns either help increase quality or are detrimental to data quality,' says Sudha Ram at the University of Arizona. Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. Ram and graduate student Jun Liu randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level. 'We used data mining techniques and identified various patterns of collaboration based on the provenance or, more specifically, who does what to Wikipedia articles,' says Ram. The researchers identified seven specific roles that Wikipedia contributors play (PDF starting on page 175): Casual Contributor, Starter, Cleaner, Copy Editor, Content Justifier, Watchdog, and All-round Editor. Starters, for example, create sentences but seldom engage in other actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with resources and links. The all-round contributors perform many different functions. 'We then clustered the articles based on these roles and examined the collaboration patterns within each cluster to see what kind of quality resulted,' says Ram. 'We found that all-round contributors dominated the best-quality entries. In the entries with the lowest quality, starters and casual contributors dominated.'"
Articles written by experienced people with a wide array of skills are stronger than those written by novices? Never could have guessed.
I always figured that some of the articles were poor because they were written by Americans, rather than much more intelligent Europeans or Asians.
Seriously, I'm encountering more and more 'deleted' articles when I search Wikipedia.
Can someone stop deleters? Or at least offer an option to view deleted articles (Deletionpedia works only for English language).
[Citation Needed]
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
I know I'm more likely to "casually contribute" to Wikipedia on a low-quality article. Maybe the casual contributors just don't see the point of changing anything in an article that's already had a lot of attention?
I think there may be a possible flaw in using Wikipedia's internal quality rating. It measures adherence to wikipedia standards... but that may not necessarily be the same thing as actual quality.
In that scheme, excellent articles with posters who tend to brush up against some of wikipedia's more picky guidelines, would be rated lower. It's minor, because in general wikipedia's guidelines are there to make better articles, but it sometimes happens.
It's like defining intelligence as the ability to do well on intelligence tests. It's certainly related, and there's not much of a better alternative, but you have to remember you aren't measuring the trait directly.
So what? delete it
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
I've seen some shocking entries, but I can't commit to spending the 20 hours or so it'd take to write a new, decent article from scratch. I guess some people can't tell that the articles suck and go ahead and quote them or whatever.
Wikipedia is great for anything involving mathematics or Star Wars. Everything else seems kind of suspect to me.
Delete you.
I wish I had the points to mod you up and Saija down. [Citation Needed] is a painfully overused meme in the best of cases, but it doesn't even make any sense here.
Articles dominated by one or two "keepers" tend to be the most biased and lowest quality. Quality edits are tossed aside merely because they do not meet the agenda wanted by the keepers.
I think the main problem with Wikipedia is it went from "an encyclopedia where you -might- find something of interest" to "a place you can find anything!" to now "a place where you can possibly find some things but if we don't like it, it gets deleted and we don't want your help unless you feel like reading 22342342343 policies, follow them exactly and patrol "your" page constantly". Seriously, Wikipedia 2-3 years ago was a lot better than Wikipedia now. Why is it that editors think deleting articles somehow makes it better? Especially since Wikipedia is online and a few new articles don't translate to (much) extra load?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
your artikel is very usefull for me.thanks
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference. Therefore, the entire analysis is bullshit.
Which is about what I've come to expect from anything that tries to meta Wikipedia.
It's a mish-mosh. As long as article creation and revision is open, it will remain one. Legitimate attempts to characterize any article's quality can only be done by a true expert in the subject matter at hand, if one can even be found. Which is why Wikipedia's resident pedants utterly foul up so many excellent contributions.
A-, B- and C-class articles, my ass.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It sounds like articles cared for by people that stick around turn out better than ones edited by drive-by people, eh?
Interesting and all, but you know, this sorta studies get cited to support all kindsa wackjob social "theories", don't they? I mean, citing such studies are deemed "rigor" and whatnot.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'm with the rest who say too many articles are being deleted. Several times I've been able to, or thought I was able to, find an article on a subject I was wanting information on. Then all I get is a deleted page, with no way to see what was deleted, and about as much clarity as to why it was deleted. At least send me to the page where you explain and quote why and what you deleted.
Preferably if you have more knowledge on the subject, write a better article and put up that as a replacement. Empty pages benefit no one. And no, there aren't any subjects too small. If they are too small for their own page, put them together with whatever else they belong, and point me to that material when you delete the former main article.
We are all God's parents.
there was a book called the cathedral and the bazaar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
it delineates the difference between bottom up and top down organization, specifically in regards to software development models like linux versus gnu
obviously, this overlaps thematically with wikipedia in that wikipedia was once a bazaar, and is now becoming a cathedral
regardless of which model is better for wikipedia, the pluses and minuses of the cathedral versus the bazaar models of software development should be instructive for what exactly wikipedia is winning, and losing, in its trade off between bazaar and cathedral
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wikipedia is basically just the online equivalent of academia. You have a small number of "experts" whom nobody can question, even when they're clearly wrong. After all, they've built a "successful" career around being experts, often bringing in huge sums of money, so how can they possibly not be correct? Oh, and they always have citations, because most of their "work" consists of them citing one another.
Thankfully, they die off eventually. But that usually just means that a small number of successor "experts" take their place, bringing with them the same bullshit as their predecessors.
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If only I could.
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
No, you can't. Without references, a reader has no way of knowing whether the article is accurate or not; and an editor who writes an article who is unfamiliar with the references that could be cited is unlikely to be sufficiently knowledgeable to genuinely produce a high-quality article.
A, B, and C-class assessments are not Wikipedia-wide. They are assessed by individual Wikiprojects (of which there are literally hundreds of these). And each Wikiproject has their own standard of what it considers A, B, and C. Some Wikiprojects are much easier, others are more rigorous (like WikiProject Military history). Furthermore, C-class is relatively new, having been created just within the past two years or so; so there's probably still a lot of B-class articles that should be C-class.
In the five years that I've been a Wikipedia editor, I've played most of these roles, but right now I'm definitely a watchdog. I primarily revert vandalism. It's a good way to stay out of edits wars. At this point, most of the stuff on Wikipedia is way too messy to clean up and/or improve. I'd rather clean up Cowboys Stadium on any given Sunday in the Fall than clean up content on Wikipedia. As for deletionists? They deal with the administrative (sigh) aspect of Wikipedia, while this study seems to be driven mainly on the content itself.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
[Citation needed.] :-P
[Citation Needed]
I can count how many huge egos are on there.
The amount of in-fighting is pretty high too.
If you are a new contributor to the site, good luck actually fitting in, you will be pushed aside by all the elitist asses who think they are god.
Article stalking theives. These are the ones who stalk and revert any edits by people, then end up adding it later on in their own words.
Delete-happy idiots that end up causing delete-revert wars.
Revert and ask questions later.
These fuckers are the worst. They have single-handedly ruined Wikipedia.
The other things don't even compare to the idiots going around reverting every single change just because.
Wikipedia was fine a few years back, but now it is just out of control.
articles that were written by experts in the relevant field.
And how did you know they were experts? Other than them telling you of course. Cos you can totally believe what people tell you about themselves on the internet.
So, you allow random people to write and edit articles, and the result is a wide variation in their quality?
Next week, can we have a paper explaining the defecation habits of bears?
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Take a look at the math articles. Heck most of the original content like episodes of BattleStar Galactica, information about cartoon characters or fringe political movements didn't have high quality references. Wikipedia built itself by specializing in materials for which only so / so or no references existed. Articles on wikipedia were higher quality that the same material on the same topics anywhere else.
And what's to say any references are accurate? They're "accurate" because they have some references, as well?
Nobody with half a brain thinks that this is the case. The whole point of references is that they allow you to *check* the accuracy of a statement, or at least determine its source.
Suppose I'm interested in learning about the atmosphere of the Moon. One anonymous person says it's a rich CNOH atmosphere just like that of the earth. Another anonymous person says that it's insignificant, almost nonexistent. How am I to distinguish between these two statements? Without references, I'm in a chattering wilderness. With references, I can determine that the latter statement comes from NASA, which actually sent people and instruments there, while the former is the opinion of some basement-dwelling neckbeard with an unfilled clozapine prescription and some noxious BO. That helps, doesn't it?
Getting published [is] generally a mix of saying the right things (ie. backing up the position of other "scientists" to help increase their chance of getting funding, regardless of how correct their research is)
This is a joke, right? The truly interesting studies *undermine* established positions.
and in the worst case, just having enough money to publish your work on your own.
Nope. No self-published person is ever taken seriously, for better or for worse.
If you filter your citations well, you can get any article to say anything you want.
And the whole point of Wikipedia is that someone else can come along and say "You used selective citations, fuckhead."
It's a mish-mosh. As long as article creation and revision is open, it will remain one. Legitimate attempts to characterize any article's quality can only be done by a true expert in the subject matter at hand, if one can even be found
We're talking about simple grammatical problems, awkward sentence structure, and the like, all of which Wikipedia is rife with. If people aren't even bothering to do simple copy-editing, the article is in in decline and a very long way from needing the assistance of a subject matter expert.
Why do Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much In Quality?
My initial reaction was because it's a free encyclopedia that anybody can edit.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
What really gets me about wikipedia is stuff like I Am Rich. Nominated for deletion, the consensus wound up being to keep it. Not to redirect it but to keep it. Then, the nominator, having failed in his attempt to delete it, merges it, despite consensus to the contrary, into App Store. Later, another user comes along and deletes it, saying it's "not important".
But wait - it gets better! The same guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) for deletion and fails in his attempt. So what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
It's interesting to note that this same user also completely and wantonly disregards the rules. When a vote to delete an article has concluded, you're not supposed to edit it, anymore, and yet they do it and get away scott free with it.
Of course, none of this tops Torchic. A front page featured article with 20 paragraphs and 46 citations now reduced to redirecting to a list of pokemon, with 2-3 paragraphs (depending on whether or not a one sentence paragraph counts) and no citations. Amazing stuff.
The notability requirement killed wikipedia. Encouraging people to provide ever better sources is something I agree with but to delete articles because the sources "aren't good enough" is ridiculous. Maybe for the George Bush article there ought to be some sort of minimum requirement but for an article on an alien race in a science fiction show? If the best source you have for a particular claim is an episode of that show than I don't see what the problem is. Besides, I'd consider an episode to be a better source, anyway, then a newsweek.com article on the show by someone who doesn't even watch it.
At the rate wikipedia is going, you're going to need sources just to prove what the sources say. Like if you have access to an article behind a paywall, wikipedia's liable to, at some point, say that you're claim that that's what the article says is insufficient - that you need to provide another source to "prove" what the article behind the paywall says.
The so-called "study" is a farce.
There is no mentioned of articles which fit the "PC" criteria that are filled with lies and deceits, such as one article where the government of a certain country has posted, blaming every problem they have on their former British colonial masters.
There is no "collaboration" whatsoever, in term of the Wikipedia readers/editors, for every time anyone tried to edit that said article will get nullified, as the government of that country has employed a "cyber patrol" group which will erase all the edited versions of the article and re-post with the "original".
That article is still in Wikipedia, as we speak.
Still filled with lies and hatreds.
Still blaming every single problem on their former British colonial masters.
But that article is Political Correct, though, for it's the British (Whites) are being blamed, and it's the non-Whites who are doing the blaming.
So it stays, in Wikipedia.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I remember years ago reading Wikipedia articles that were written by experts in the relevant field. Much of their work was destroyed as people went through asking for citations to third-party sources--and since most of the relevant citations would have to come from print material only available at large university libraries, rather than seek out original sources various contributors eventually whittled those articles down to nothing.
That's a real dilemma though. Do you accept on faith that un-cited information from an anonymous source because it looks right ? Complete nonsense can be made to sound good. Or do you accept only a more limited set of information for which you can at least validate the sources so you have a fighting chance ? The only optimal solution would be to offer both with the article with citations being the preferred one but that adds unwanted complexity and cost.
Personally I think your expert friends should have just linked their sources from the get-go. Linking is what the web was built on in the first place for pete's sake.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I have tried to add info to some wikipedia articles because of errors or because I'm an expert on some facet and the changes are always reverted - so I will never bother to edit an article
Fixed that for you. If wikipedia allowed users to volunteer to sign pages, and in that signature were their qualifications, then some credence could be attached to the article -- referenced or not.
Add to that, that all wikiadmins really should be identified on the site. If they are going to edit, delete, attack and defend content, as well as ban users, we really should know what their qualifications actually are.
I'd be willing to bet 90% of the current problems with wikipedia would disappear overnight if the admins lost their anonymity. Much of the neofascist behavior, and agenda-ism, would certainly disappear. It solves the "who watches the watchers" problem overnight.
While there are good reasons why articles can be submitted anonymously, those in charge of the site do NOT need to be anonymous -- and for the sake of transparency, honesty and ethical credibility, we NEED to know who they are. Are they afraid of the truth? What do they have to hide?
No one has mentioned that PR firms ravage Wikipedia? It's what they're paid to do.
Try editing the Fox News page sometime -- heck, Fox's PR firm even got all criticism moved to an entirely different page because it looked bad. They earned their money, though.
Equally nonsensical are the seemingly random insertion of [citation needed] tags on things that are matters of public record.
In that case, you can help Wikipedia by removing the {{citation needed}} and replacing it with <ref>name of the relevant public record</ref>.
Wikipedia is prime to be "taken down" by a peer reviewed competitor (or simply by someone who can bother with basic copy-editing). Either Wikipedia provides that service themselves, for example by cleaning up and freezing articles, or eventually someone else will do it for them.
Then why hasn't Citizendium or Veropedia already done this?
Applegate will play Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched fame, who died of colorectal cancer, in the upcoming film Everything Is Going to Be Just Fine, due to be released in 2009.
In January 2009, Applegate appeared with her TV brother David Faustino (Bud Bundy from Married with Children) in an episode of Faustino's show Starving.[11]
Within two lines of each other, one article is talking about the future tense in 2009 and the past tense in 2009. Anyone editing the article as a whole would notice this. When, however, you have people editing piece by piece, simple mistakes can be made like that.
Consider an edit made on March 2009. January of that year was the past and November was the future.
Here's my citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity
Bad citation. An encyclopedia is not a reliable source, a wiki doubly not. I'll have to report you to the IRS.
Actually, a large part of the problem is that Wikipedia always has been a Cathedral.
Cathedrals are venues where the decisions are made by a person or persons in a position of near-absolute power over the cathedral's output. That elite position exists on Wikipedia too. It's called The Last Guy To Edit.
In wiki theory, it doesn't matter that every person to edit, at the time they are editing, are acting as the Supreme Ruler of the Cathedral. The theory is that any abuse of this power will be corrected because:
1) some other person who knows how to edit will come along;
2) that person will see that the Last Guy To Edit committed some sort of wrongdoing;
3) that person will become the new Last Guy To Edit and undo anything bad done by the previous Last Guy To Edit.
In practice, however, there is no guarantee that 1, 2 and 3 will happen -- at least not within any time-frame that would count to a reasonable person as "success". The more articles Wikipedia adds, in fact, the greater the chance grows that the correction process will fail at any given step, because the number of good editors who can and will do corrections is not growing as fast as the number of articles, or even as fast as the number of poor editors who, through design or lack of ability, will create situations that need correction.
Wikipedia can't be truly said to follow Bazaar principles as long as one person can come along and unilaterally undo what all the rest of the Bazaar is doing.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Could it really be as simple as that?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This is arrogance in the extreme - destroying some people's work because they incorrectly assumed that no-one would ever want to see it.
Notability does not work that way.
Verifiability of each claim against reliable sources is Wikipedia's core content policy. "Reliable sources" is Wikipedia-speak for scholarly or mainstream media. Notability of a topic is merely an upper bound on verifiability of claims made about a topic: whether it "has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." But if you know of one or more reliable sources about the "particular topic" in question, try this:
But it seems to me that injecting the additional level of, "Blog X says Professor Y is an expert, so he's an expert for purposes of Wikipedia" is not an improvement over "Professor Y says he's an expert who contributes directly to Wikipedia."
Which is why Wikipedia doesn't allow "Blog X says Professor Y is an expert"; instead it requires "Scholarly or mainstream media source X says Professor Y is an expert".
They totally neglected GA-class [...] A, B, and C-class assessments are not Wikipedia-wide
But what WikiProjects' assessment criteria have in common is that B is below GA and A is between GA and FA.
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I can't fathom why there can't be an article for every sequence of characters. Would seem to be more informative that way. If 'iagonwoanrboarno' doesn't mean anything, it'll simply be a shorter article, and I probably will never see it anyway.
Long live the BSD license
You can see non-editable versions of deleted pages at Deletionpedia.
I'd be willing to bet 90% of the current problems with wikipedia would disappear overnight if the admins lost their anonymity. Much of the neofascist behavior, and agenda-ism, would certainly disappear. It solves the "who watches the watchers" problem overnight.
I'm not so sure about that. If the admins lose there anonimity , it becomes very easy for someone with enough power , to pressure them.
For example , you could write something about a local politician , which that politician doesn't like ( even if it's true ) . If your identity is known , that person can easily pressure you into changing your story.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Here you go :
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
Slipping shoelaces ?
There is an effort by Neo-Nazis to rebrand themselves and their ideology as "National Socialism." Several Wikipedia admins have been taking the side of these nutcases over at the Wikipedia article on Nazi Party member and noted philosopher Martin Heidegger (which is currently frozen.) A number of editors have insisted that Heidegger be referred to only as "National Socialist" and not as "Nazi."
Some of these Wikipedia admins don't even read the Talk Page. They just jump right in and take action.
The action of ignorant Wikipedia admins over at the Heidegger article made me realize that the world would be better off if there were no Wikipedia. I hope it goes the way of AOL and Computerland computer stores. And as far as Google giving Wikipedia $2M recently, SHAME ON GOOGLE!
It's because several of the admins are 13-15 years old, which IMO is a big problem.
However, good clear writing can be judged. The study points out that the best wikipedia entries are done by editors who are GOOD writers who know how to a) contribute new sentences (write a first draft), b) re-write sentences (re-drafting), c) add references (source checking), d) make grammatical and other edits (final drafting).
The formula for writing good content has not changed. It's just the proportions (collaboration) that have made the process more efficient and provided more content which are in need of lots of editing!
I wonder how an "original research license" would work. Say you are a physicist in the University of Mozarella somewhere, you go through the special registration form, get an activation email in your academic email address (probably after someone manually checks that the address is listed as belonging to a faculty member) and then get the ability to cite "John Cheeseface, Physics PhD" for your own additions. Obviously that doesn't guarantee the information is trustworthy, but at least it's very easy for me to look up the dude and decide if it is. If it gets popular enough, you could even have scientist use wikipedia as an auxiliary channel to publish research.
Utter nonsense. The reader may, if they wish to verify anything, simply turn to Google and further educate themselves on the subject matter, or turn to researching it themselves. The article may, in fact, justify itself by explaining matters sufficiently. If the article is accurate and in-depth, it *is* high quality because the point is to impute correct information in its perusal, which such an article will do just as well as one with references. Better, in fact, because having references in no way means that the article is correct, as compared to an article that actually is correct.
For instance, if I tell you that the standard black level for AFSK SSTV is 1500 hz, I have just handed you a 100% true piece of information. If some other wag tells you it is 2000 hz, and gives a citation to a page that describes an SSTV system that uses 2000 Hz, they have snowed you using the citation, not further educated you. Citations are no more inherently accurate than the articles that contain them are. The issue is simply, is the article correct, or is it not? And the answer to that depends in no way upon citations. Facts are facts, they're not subject to your taste for further linkage.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I refuse to cite wikipedia as a source for documents or articles. Why? Click on these two links for an example.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/19/wikibullies-at-work-the-national-post-exposes-broad-trust-issues-over-wikipedia-climate-information/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/19/climategatekeeping-wikipedia/
why is water wet?