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.'"

Comments

Missing role: deleters

[Cyberax]

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).

Re:Missing role: deleters

[thelamecamel]

Yes, this is really quite pathetic. On several occasions now I have wanted some information on a particular topic (e.g. a shitty old game I picked up, my mobile phone, or even a description of lemon party). I go to the wikipedia page, I can tell that several people went to the effort of writing an entry on that topic but the page was deleted by someone who decided that no-one would ever want to see that information. This is arrogance in the extreme - destroying some people's work because they incorrectly assumed that no-one would ever want to see it. Was the article getting in the way before it was deleted?!

Surely Wikipedia could have a link to view pages that were 'deleted' for non-notability - what would be so bad about that?

Quality Ratings

[Toonol]

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.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My experience with WikiPedia

[QuietLagoon]

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.

Wikipedia's Editors

[Darkness404]

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?

Re:Wikipedia's Editors

[rm999]

It's funny, some comments in here complain that many articles have gotten stale and aren't well-maintained. Others, like yours, complain that there aren't enough articles. These two complaints are at odds with each other - a fixed number of editors can either maintain a smaller, more important set of articles, or can devote their time to starting and watching new articles. Your criticism is largely overblown too: there are, on average, over 1000 new articles a day. I'd like to see any print Encyclopedia do this in a year.

Frankly, I prefer less but higher-quality articles, because it minimizes the amount of misinformation (one of the biggest plagues in early Wikipedia). It helps minimize the number of esoteric articles from being started and then forgotten. The only real rule you need to know when starting an article is notability: the 22342342343 policies are only in place to remove subjectivity from the process. Common sense can get you most of the way there, but if you are in the habit of starting articles understanding the five "general notability guideline" will save you a lot of hassle. And only takes about five minutes.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:One key flaw

[Blakey Rat]

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?

Re:Quality isn't such a simple metric, never will

[owlnation]

Yes , you can . However Without references, a reader has no way of knowing whether the article is accurate or not

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?