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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.'"
Also updates vary. For example:
Christina_Applegate
Current career
Applegate starred in the ABC comedy, Samantha Who?, until it was canceled on May 18, 2009. The series costarred Jean Smart, Jennifer Esposito, and Melissa McCarthy. The series was about a 30-year-old who, after a hit-and-run accident, develops amnesia and has to rediscover her life, her relationships, and herself.[9] Shortly after the cancellation was announced, Applegate began a campaign to get the show back into production,[10] which was unsuccessful.
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.
Also, it doesn't help that I am too lazy to edit the changes myself. Leave it up to the snobby community. I've tried to contribute before, it was the last time I made that mistake.