Why Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much In Quality 160
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.'"
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also updates vary. For example:
Christina_Applegate [wikipedia.org]
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.
Maybe looking at it the wrong way? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Missing role: deleters (Score:2, Interesting)
Deletionpedia [dbatley.com] archives deleted wikipedia pages. Unfortunately, the site is mostly not working at the moment but they do say they're continuing to archive deleted pages while they get the site up again.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
While true, one might say that stasis is the proper state for a repository of knowledge. Why should articles be under continual maintenance when the subject area is for the most part static?
Politics, religion, and anything that passes for either are the least desirable things for Wiki. Any articles dealing in either area are essentially useless, bias magnets.
But there is very little new information on the vast majority of subjects, so having 90% of them "dead" is just fine.
Equally nonsensical are the seemingly random insertion of [citation needed] tags on things that are matters of public record. Often these are used to cast doubt on an article where there is no question of fact. (I've even seen them inserted after well known figures middle name, as if there were some question what the middle name was).
Re:Wikipedia's Editors (Score:1, Interesting)
Why is it that editors think deleting articles somehow makes it better?
Various reasons I expect but ONE of them is that some of the other editors think that Wikipedia is a great place to write stuff about innocent private people without referencing it to anything. This is one of Wikipedia's biggest problems - people who want to a) play at being a virtual peeping tom and b) share the dirt with the rest of the world. People you wouldn't tolerate offline but who thrive off the pseudonymity of places like Wikipedia. Thankfully there are people on Wikipedia with enough of a social conscience to clear some of that crap up.
One key flaw (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]). 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.
Re:Wikipedia's Editors (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, your analogy is wrong. It's the older, established boring Wikipedia neighborhoods where you can shit in the middle of the street and the turd will be there 6 months later. Places like articles on old computer software, or mid-sized towns, or automotive models.
There is very little editing activity on topics that are non-controversial and don't have any political or nationalistic angles. Many of these articles are simply terrible, yet still end up as top google results. And the edit histories show nothing major has changed for 2-3 years.
That tells me that Wikipedia is prime to be "taken down" by a peer reviewed competitor (or simply by someone who can bother with basic copy-editing). Either Wikipedia provides that service themselves, for example by cleaning up and freezing articles, or eventually someone else will do it for them.