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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.'"
Articles written by experienced people with a wide array of skills are stronger than those written by novices? Never could have guessed.
I always figured that some of the articles were poor because they were written by Americans, rather than much more intelligent Europeans or Asians.
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 know I'm more likely to "casually contribute" to Wikipedia on a low-quality article. Maybe the casual contributors just don't see the point of changing anything in an article that's already had a lot of attention?
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.
So what? delete it
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
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.
Wikipedia is great for anything involving mathematics or Star Wars. Everything else seems kind of suspect to me.
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.
there was a book called the cathedral and the bazaar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
it delineates the difference between bottom up and top down organization, specifically in regards to software development models like linux versus gnu
obviously, this overlaps thematically with wikipedia in that wikipedia was once a bazaar, and is now becoming a cathedral
regardless of which model is better for wikipedia, the pluses and minuses of the cathedral versus the bazaar models of software development should be instructive for what exactly wikipedia is winning, and losing, in its trade off between bazaar and cathedral
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
A, B, and C-class assessments are not Wikipedia-wide. They are assessed by individual Wikiprojects (of which there are literally hundreds of these). And each Wikiproject has their own standard of what it considers A, B, and C. Some Wikiprojects are much easier, others are more rigorous (like WikiProject Military history). Furthermore, C-class is relatively new, having been created just within the past two years or so; so there's probably still a lot of B-class articles that should be C-class.
In the five years that I've been a Wikipedia editor, I've played most of these roles, but right now I'm definitely a watchdog. I primarily revert vandalism. It's a good way to stay out of edits wars. At this point, most of the stuff on Wikipedia is way too messy to clean up and/or improve. I'd rather clean up Cowboys Stadium on any given Sunday in the Fall than clean up content on Wikipedia. As for deletionists? They deal with the administrative (sigh) aspect of Wikipedia, while this study seems to be driven mainly on the content itself.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
You can easily have an extremely high quality, 100% accurate and in-depth Wikipedia article without a single external reference.
[Citation needed.] :-P
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
Equally nonsensical are the seemingly random insertion of [citation needed] tags on things that are matters of public record.
In that case, you can help Wikipedia by removing the {{citation needed}} and replacing it with <ref>name of the relevant public record</ref>.
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.