Cormac Lawler wrote:
To get around these philosophical issues, I believe that the only way to measure quality of articles (especially contentious ones) is qualitatively, ie by asking people/experts their opinions of articles, their experience of the community etc and analysing the types of reactions, the emotional resonance (or lack thereof), the language they used etc. So far, I haven't seen many qualitative studies of Wikipedia - I did one last Christmas as a kind of pilot study for my dissertation, which you can see here: http://wikisource.org/wiki/A_small_scale_study_of_Wikipedia and some others, from Wikimania, include: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-PA1 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-JT1 Note: almost all Wikimania papers are still works in progress, including mine :)
The best study I know is done by Andreas Brändle:
http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimania05/AB1
He shows that the number of authors is the most important variable to predict the quality.
Jakob