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

Political Correctness and Wikipedia

[Taco Cowboy]

The so-called "study" is a farce.

There is no mentioned of articles which fit the "PC" criteria that are filled with lies and deceits, such as one article where the government of a certain country has posted, blaming every problem they have on their former British colonial masters.

There is no "collaboration" whatsoever, in term of the Wikipedia readers/editors, for every time anyone tried to edit that said article will get nullified, as the government of that country has employed a "cyber patrol" group which will erase all the edited versions of the article and re-post with the "original".

That article is still in Wikipedia, as we speak.

Still filled with lies and hatreds.

Still blaming every single problem on their former British colonial masters.

But that article is Political Correct, though, for it's the British (Whites) are being blamed, and it's the non-Whites who are doing the blaming.

So it stays, in Wikipedia.