Hello Wikipedia Researchers,
As university classes are beginning, you may have heard about the Wikimedia Public Policy Initiative (PPI) which has been gaining some media attention. I just wanted to tell you about what's going on the research side of the initiative. A lot of the assessment will be conducted through the Wikiproject: United States Public Policy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...) When the Wikiproject commenced in July a quantitative version of the 1.0 article quality metric emerged through collaboration with the active community members. That metric can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli... Now we are actively recruiting Wikipedians and public policy experts to be a part of the article assessment team for the project. These article assessments will be a basis for evaluation of the project's success. The first task of the assessment team is to run some experiments on the metric and see how much variation exists within the tool.
The project's article quality assessment coincides with the release of the Article Feedback Tool and the PPI is serving as a pilot to introduce this feature. Check out: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/article-feedback-pilot-edit-this-featu... We are hoping that a core group of Wikipedians interested in article assessment will emerge through participation in the PPI and will continue to work with the foundation in development of other article assessment methods, like the Article Feedback Tool.
In keeping with Wikipedia transparency principles, a more detailed version of the research plan is available here: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_Evaluation_and_R...
If you would like to be involved in this project please sign up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...
-Amy