[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[kosebamse at gmx.net]

Jimmy Wales wrote on Sun Nov 13 03:48:10 UTC 2005:

>you took any random 20 articles and compared them to their predecessors
>2 years ago, virtually _all_ articles would have improved.  

I agree. However, to judge a reference work, do you go by the best, or the
worst, or the average quality? I think most readers would judge us by their
first few impressions. As soon as they stray away from the featured article
on the front page, or happen to run into the random pages, their impression
will be not favorable. That's what I tried to find to out with my twenty
random pages.

>> A thought experiment: if we were the editorial committee of an
>>encyclopedia to be written from scratch and were given Wikipedia's
>>current content as a basis (but not the user base), what would we do? I
>>guess we would put our energy into improving the material, i.e.
>>rewriting/deleting/merging most of it. But we would not try to acquire
>>more articles of that quality. (Ah wait, we ARE the editorial committee
>>of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch...)

>I think this is a brilliant observation. :-)

>I absolutely do think that acquisition of huge numbers of additional
>stubs on increasingly narrow topics ought not to be a priority, and
>certainly ought not to be allowed to get in the way of quality
>improvement on existing articles.

But it IS getting in the way. I have recently spent several hours patrolling
the newpages and recent changes, and that was a very sobering experience.
While I have no statistics (would be an interesting topic, though), I
estimate that more than ninety percent of the newpages by anonymous
contributors are unsalveageable. Of the rest, a sound majority qualifies for
merging or heavy reworking. Plus an unbelievable amount of vandalism. I
spent most of my time writing {{test}}, {{test2}}, {{test3}}, and {{test4}}
messages at high speed, deleting, reverting and occasionally blocking a
vandal. I can't remember seeing more than a few new pages by anonymous
editors that resmbled anything remotely interesting or well-written. There
were also many pages by newly-logged-in users that were no better. To
summarise, the signal-to-noise ratio on recent changes is depressingly low,
and many qualified editors spend hours and hours trying to pick the few
jewels out of mountains of dirt.

If we look at the continuum of quality ranging from the average anon's
average "Phil is gay" contribution to well-researched work by well-informed
people, it is reasonable to assume that even above the newpages level there
is a great body of contributions with a negative benefit-versus-work-needed
balance. In my opinion, it far too great.

>(At the same time, of course, it's worth pointing out that there's an
>easy mental trap to fall into... assuming that time people are spending
>working on obscure fancruft could in any way be diverted into increasing
>the quality of other articles.  That's probably not true.)

Yes. (Warning: heresy ahead) I would simply reply that we could do without
these people. Along with the vandals and trolls and clueless kids, they
waste the time and energy that we should spend improving our encyclopedia.
They waste an _enormous_ amount of time and energy while not helping us
much. 

Another thought experiment: What if we shut down new page creation for a
year? Simply declare 2006 the year of quality improvement and accept no new
pages until 2007. We might lose may good editors. We might lose many
_potential_ good editors. We would drop in the Alexa ranking. We might lose
donations (although I doubt it). But we could start lifting the quality of
the average article to where it belongs, and we would have a chance to lift
our reputation beyond the "public toilet" image that has deservedly been
bestowed upon us.

So much for the heresy. Now flame me. Kosebamse

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