As I said …

Of course if any tool is deployed to automatically assess article quality, then we can expect people to “game” it

This is exactly what the students are doing. They’ve obviously suspect that their Wikipedia assignments are being assessed by trivial checks like number of references and are now trying “game” the system. I presume this is their experience with assignment writing more generally. In which case it says more about their teachers than it does about Wikipedia.

But generally Wikipedia articles are not written by students for academic credit, so most Wikipedia articles should not exhibit this sort of reference-gaming behaviour.

Kerry

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From: Stuart Yeates [mailto:syeates@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, 16 December 2013 10:27 AM
To: kerry.raymond@gmail.com; Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Cc: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Existitng Research on Article QualityHeuristics?

On 15/12/2013, at 23:36, "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond@gmail.com> wrote:

I doubt there is any single metric that is a predictor of quality but I think citations is probably a good proxy. Of course, there are probably counter-examples but generally an article with lots of citations suggests a sincere effort at a better-quality article.

We are currently having the opposite experience in the education field. The problem is tertiary level students who have learn that references are important, but not that the nature of the thing referenced is important. So when a lecturer sets a class assignment of writing a Wikipedia article they include their list of 50 primary sources that they've been building up in zotero, with little to no consideration of their appropriateness.

Then they wonder why the article gets PRODd. 

Cheers

Stuart