The Curious Case of Increasing Misspelling Rates On Wikipedia 285
An anonymous reader writes "The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources. As the saying goes, the more eyes the better. One particular student who was curious about this conducted rudimentary text mining on a sampling of the Wikipedia corpus to discover how misspelling rates on Wikipedia change through time. The results appear to indicate an increasing rate of misspellings through time. The author proposes that this consistent increase is the result of Wikipedia contributors using more complex language, which the test is unable to cope with. How do the results of this test compare to your own observations on the detail accuracy of massively crowd-sourced applications?"
Eye don't no (Score:2, Interesting)
Eye don't no how ewe can automate proof reading. You still knead a human in the loupe.
Re:Many of the smart people have been driven away? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't say I've seen that on all articles on Wikipedia, but certainly I have seen it on some. I've seen articles dumbed down to suit the majority of the readers, rather than split and refined to allow the majority a summary and those wanting more information access to that. This certainly discourages those who are subject matter experts - what's the point in being an expert in something if all that's wanted is pub quiz grade?
However, I emphasize that this is NOT what I've seen for the majority of articles. Some articles have been abandoned (occasionally in mid-edit, from the looks of it), some are constantly being updated with updates in conflict with each other, yet others are updated and are of extraordinarily high quality. It runs the full gamut.
I would far prefer a layered approach, so that you could get access to whatever level of detail you wanted, but the contributors just aren't there to get that. It's a pity, and the net result is uneven quality, but Wikipedia is a case where it's better to have an imperfect something than a perfect nothing.
Re:Spellink chekers. Duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have seen articles on Wikipedia that stick around for any reasonable length of time (about six months to a year being typical) usually attract grammar nazis (or people who are annoyed by bad grammar in general) that do a copy edit and try to fix the article to make it read better. Longer articles tend to attract more people than stubs, particularly if they are well linked to other articles. The subject matter doesn't seem to make a difference, and there are a few bots on Wikipedia which try to scan articles for spelling errors and other minor issues.
The issue of British vs. American spellings has been a long resolved issue, and for the most part consistency is more the rule than anything else. Sometimes I've seen protracted edit wars over grammar usage between several editors, but even that tends to be rather harmless.
My point here is that the proofreading does happen, it just happens on a slower time scale and is something that usually only shows up for more mature articles, mature as in more well developed articles that seem to be trying to say something. Articles that are in a constant flux of revision will be less likely to see this kind of activity, or more accurately will tend to see such efforts wasted as the article content changes. Still, if you can get an article to "B quality" status or better, the grammar and quality of the article in terms of spelling and other aspects will be reviewed by at least somebody over time.