On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon@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&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=Samantha_Stosur is 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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