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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.'"
Why is it that editors think deleting articles somehow makes it better?
Because ;
- if the quality of Wikipedia is measured by averaging the quality of all its articles, deleting the crap raises the quality of Wikipedia.
- crap inevitably attracts more crap. If the crap articles weren't deleted they would multiply.
- crap pages, written by people who mistake Wikipedia for a free web-host for their fan site, give Wikipedia a bad name.
- if you can't find the good articles for stumbling over the crap, you're likely to stop looking and go some place else.
If crap pages weren't deleted Wikipedia would drown under them. Regardless of infinite disk space, or unlimited bandwidth. Wikipedia is essentially a database. If you fill a database with too much garbage it becomes useless, no matter how much data of true value in in there also. The noise to signal ratio becomes unbearable.