Re Laura's comment.
I don't dispute that there are plenty of high quality articles which have had only one or two contributors. However my assumption and experience is that in general the more editors the better the quality, and I'd love to see that assumption tested by research. There may be some maximum above which quality does not rise, and there are clearly a number of gifted members of the community whose work is as good as our best crowdsourced work, especially when the crowdsourcing element is to address the minor imperfection that comes from their own blind spot. It would be well worthwhile to learn if Women's football is an exception to this, or indeed if my own confidence in crowd sourcing is mistaken
I should also add that while I wouldn't filter out minor edits you might as well filter out reverted edits and their reversion. Some of our articles are notorious vandal targets and their quality is usually unaffected by a hundred vandalisms and reversions of vandalism per annum. Beaver before it was semi protected in Autumn 2011https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beaver&offset=20111211084232&action=historybeing a case in point. This also feeds into Kerry's point that many assessments are outdated. An article that has been a vandalism target might have been edited a hundred times since it was assessed, and yet it is likely to have changed less than one with only half a dozen edits all of which added content.
Jonathan
On 15 December 2013 09:44, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 9:53 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
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 systemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/AssessmentI'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 Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:UGANDA#Recognized_content .
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.
Except why would this be something that would be an indicator of quality? I've done an analysis recently of football player biographies where I looked at the total volume of edits, date created, total number of citations and total number of pictures and none of these factors correlates to article quality. You can have an article with 1,400 editors and still have it be assessed as a start. Indeed, some of the lesser known articles may actually attract specialist contributors who almost exclusively write to one topic and then take the article to DYK, GA, A or FA. The end result is you have articles with low page views that are really great that are maintained by one or two writers.
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.
Yeah, I'd be skeptical of this overall though it might be bad. The problem is you could get say one contentious section of the article that ends up fully cited or overcited while the rest of the article ends up poorly cited. At the same time, you can get B articles that really should be GAs but people have been burned by that process so they just take it to B and left it there. I have heard this quite a few time from female Wikipedians operating in certain places that the process actually puts them off.
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