On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote:
I agree, having a high number of edit does not
signify creating high
quality content - it may only attest to the high use of semi-automated
tools for minor edits.
I also don't dispute that anon's can contribute high quality content, and
they do a lot of edits. My point was:
* anon's don't contribute significantly to most content on Wikipedia that
gets peer reviewed (as Pierre noted, by that time they've probably
registered anyway);
* hence majority of Wikipedia's GA+ content is not written by anonymous
editors (but the GA+ content is only a small percentage of Wikipedia's
total content);
Do you have any evidence for anons don't contribute significantly to
content that gets peer reviewed? The reason it would appear they are not
involved in processes is because more often than they expressly prohibited
from doing so. The implication here could be: IP addresses are
contributing GA level content but regular contributors are not monitoring
articles where IP addresses are doing lots of work and regular contributors
are not supporting taking of the work to the highest level.
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wi…
one of the more active articles (which is admittedly crap) with a high
IP address ratio. There are several highly active Wikipedia editors
contributing to it. 463 of the 749 editors are IP addresses. Still, total
edits by registered editors outnumbers unregistered editors with 1,150
total edits to 1,175. Despite this, the volume of contributors are not
actually resulting in edits that work towards improving assessment.
A better analysis could be something like this: IP addresses are more
likely to represent a large editing population on an article that has
higher visibility and more traffic. The quality of the contributions to
these articles is universally poor for registered and unregistered users.
At the same time, wikipedia processes favour articles that have less
visibility and where there is less inherent conflict. The necessity of
covering a topic comprehensively also serves as a barrier to taking these
higher visibility articles to GA as this is a challenge, and serves as a
discouraging factor for taking an article through processes. GA, Peer
Review and FAC favour more narrow topics that are less visible and get less
traffic. This type of article is likely to have a much small editing pool,
and less likely to be found by IP address editors. (Example: Tennis
articles have more IP address edits than articles about sport shooting.)
This means IP addresses are less likely to be actively contributing to
these articles. As processes implicitly lock them out, there is little
reason for these users to improve per guidelines on these less visible
articles.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
--
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blog:
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