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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.'"
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).
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.
Because 90% of Wikipedia is dead. People drive-by now and then and drop in a sentence or fix a spelling error, but for the most part nobody is editing the articles unless it's a politically contentious topic.
The fun part was writing the articles in the first place, now phase is over, nobody wants to be Wikipedia's janitorial crew and deal with the super-aspbergers that populate that place. Which is why Wikipedia is doomed to a slow bit-rot into irrelevance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Which is why Wikipedia is doomed to a slow bit-rot into irrelevance."
Wikipedia is still one of the most popular websites on the internet - claiming it is dead or dying is premature and probably wrong. There are more than enough editors to maintain the vast majority of popular articles. More esoteric topical articles such as a living actress will become stale every now and then (this has always been true on Wikipedia), but established topics have, well... established articles. And these types of articles will make up the core of any encyclopedia.
I like analogies: Wikipedia is like a large city that has been planned and built in the last six years. Nothing will ever destroy the large, bustling downtown. For example, the "World War II" building is already constructed. A random bum can't come by and knock it down, but he can pee on the side of the door and annoy some people. Some passerby will clean it up in about 10 seconds. The younger, more active parts of town will constantly have new buildings coming up and being destroyed, but most visitors don't come to see these parts. And hey, if someone visits this part of town and sees a broken door, he can fix it in about 5 minutes. As long as the Wikipedia city is the best city in the world, the number of casual visitors like this will grow, not fall.
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.
You might think this is obvious, but any Slashdot article on Wikipedia inevitably includes lots of comments saying "My drive-by edit was reverted and I'm never contributing again and Wikipedia is dying." Lots of people on Slashdot do seem to think that an agglomeration of off-the-cuff edits could somehow produce quality articles.
What the holy shit are you talking about?
Maybe the study should have been, "why are people working with Wikipedia completely unable to communicate in English to other people?" Shit, at the very least, why not tell us what your constantly-used GA and FA acronyms actually *mean*.
Anybody care to translate that into English?
Comment of the year
Agreed, though it doesn't have to be that way. I see articles that need to be created or extensive revised all the time. But 4 years ago people worked together to create content. Now they work together to destroy content.
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.
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.
Because 90% of Wikipedia is dead. People drive-by now and then and drop in a sentence or fix a spelling error, but for the most part nobody is editing the articles unless it's a politically contentious topic.
Oh come on. 90% of articles probably concern topics that are either "finished" or are part of a domain in which scholarship is currently very slow moving. Once an article on a particular deceased author is written for example it shouldn't be updated unless some new insights are gained at some point. Likewise for some scientists and theories which have been superseded or are well established. Knowledge doesn't "bit-rot".
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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.
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?
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.