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Why Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much In Quality

Posted by kdawson on from the shoulder-to-shoulder dept.

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.'"

8 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by d34dluk3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Articles written by experienced people with a wide array of skills are stronger than those written by novices? Never could have guessed.

  2. Oh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I always figured that some of the articles were poor because they were written by Americans, rather than much more intelligent Europeans or Asians.

    1. Re:Oh. by Arthur+Grumbine · · Score: 3, Funny

      I always figured that some of the articles were poor because they were written by Americans, rather than much more intelligent Europeans or Asians.

      At first I thought you were trolling, but then I checked the facts ! With how well-written that article was I can only assume it was someone from Hong Kong.

      --
      Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
  3. Quality by bsDaemon · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wikipedia is great for anything involving mathematics or Star Wars. Everything else seems kind of suspect to me.

  4. Re:Missing role: deleters by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Exactly. And then these people who revert -any- change without even looking at it. What? An anonymous contributor added a few words to make a phrase make since? Revert it!

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  5. Re:Missing role: deleters by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Reverted. I wrote that so it must be perfect! How dare someone have the -audacity- to change one of my words on -my- article! What is the world coming to? An encyclopedia where the masses can edit it!?

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  6. Re:Missing role: deleters by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 3, Funny

    Audacity is open source, so anyone can have it.

    Here's my citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity

  7. Re:Quality isn't such a simple metric, never will by interkin3tic · · Score: 3, Funny

    You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.

    [Citation needed.] :-P