[WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

kosebamse at gmx.net wrote:
> 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.
> 

Here's a better idea: start from the main page.

Featured article is [[Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9]]. Description links
[[Photograph]], [[Schmidt telescope]] (which is a redirect), [[Roche
limit]] and a few others...

- [[Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9]] is featured; I'll come back to this.
- [[Photograph]] is pretty short but reasonable
- [[Schmidt camera]] is fairly technical but readable
- [[Roche limit]] is featured

Now, from the main page article we find the following "items of interest":

- [[Palomar Observatory]], also linked from the main page, is reasonable
- [[Astronomical spectroscopy]] is fairly long, reasonably technical,
but readable
- [[Hubble Space Telescope]] is featured
- [[Ulysses probe]] is short but reasonable

So, what have we found?

>From the main page, I've found 3 featured articles, and anything else of
interest wasn't bad. Maybe it's just the subject matter we're dealing
with (hard science tends to be easy to write about because you don't
need to interpret and speculate from 1000 sources); how will tommorrow's
featured article fare?

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
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"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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