Re other dimensions or heuristics:

Very few articles are rated as Featured, and not that many as Good, if you are going to use that rating system I'd suggest also including the lower levels, and indeed whether an article has been assessed and typically how long it takes for a new article to be assessed. Uganda for example has 1 Featured article, 3 Good Articles and nearly 400 unassessed on the English language Wikipedia.

For a crowd sourced project like Wikipedia the size of the crowd is crucial and varies hugely per article. So I'd suggest counting the number of different editors other than bots who have contributed to the article. It might also be worth getting some measure of local internet speed or usage level as context. There was a big upgrade to East Africa's Internet connection a few years ago. For Wikipedia the crucial metric is the size of the Internet comfortable population with some free time and ready access to PCs, I'm not sure we've yet measured how long it takes from people getting internet access to their being sufficiently confident to edit Wikipedia articles, I suspect the answer is age related,  but it would be worth checking the various editor surveys to see if this has been collected yet. My understanding is that in much of Africa many people are bypassing the whole PC thing and going straight to smartphones, and of course for mobilephone users Wikipedia is essentially a queryable media rather than an interactive editable one.

Whether or not a Wikipedia article has references is a quality dimension you might want to look at. At least on EN it is widely assumed to be a measure of quality, though I don't recall ever seeing a study of the relative accuracy of cited and uncited Wikipedia information.

Thankfully the Article Feedback tool has been almost eradicated from the English language Wikipedia, I don't know if it is still on French or Swahili. I don't see it as being connected to the quality of article, thouugh it should be an interesting measure of how loved or hated a given celebrity was during the time the tool was deployed. So I'd suggest ignoring it in your research on article quality.

Hope that helps

Jonathan


On 15 December 2013 06:15, Klein,Max <kleinm@oclc.org> wrote:
Wiki Research Junkies,

I am investigating the comparative quality of articles about  Cote d'Ivoire and Uganda versus other countries. I wanted to answer the question of what makes high-quality articles? Can anyone point me to any existing research on heuristics of Article Quality? That is, determining an articles quality by the wikitext properties, without human rating? I would also consider using data from the Article Feedback Tools, if there were dumps available for each Article in English, French, and Swahili Wikipedias.  This is all the raw data I can seem to find  http://toolserver.org/~dartar/aft5/dumps/

The heuristic technique that I currently using is training a naive Bayesian filter based on:

  • Per Section.

    • Text length in each section

    • Infoboxes in each section.

      • Filled parameters in each infobox

    • Images in each section

  • Good Article, Featured Article?

  • Then Normalize on Page Views per on population / speakers of native language

Can you also think of any other dimensions or heuristics to programatically rate?


Best,

Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023

_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l