Ziko, could you please supply the full reference to Haber's article? Indeed, what I observe in History-related articles is almost a tendency towards positivism, histoire événementielle - hence, for instance, the vast number of battle themes. Discussion of historiographic approaches to concepts is usually quite rare and badly written.
Anyone willing to conduct comparative research on quality of History-related articles, please drop me a note!
Juliana.
On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Anders,
Thank you for bringing this up. My experience is that there is still a huge gap between computer-based quantity-oriented studies and human-based selective sample quality-oriented studies.
I published in 2009 a paper on "small" or "weak" articles but I am afraid that it was too much a numbers' game. It contained a table that differentiated between large, middle-sized, small and mini Wikipedias, with some assumptions on the quality and the power to cover topics.
Last year I started with a paper but the publishers seemed not to finish their project. I compared the notability criteria of en, de, nl, af (Afrikaans) and fo (Frisian) and found out that they are actually very comparable, as far as they can be compared at all. The often assumed "severity" of de.wp on notability seems to be a myth, maybe based on anti German cliche.
Now I have made for my lectures a table of small and larger encyclopedic articles in order to compare a topic in different reference works. Reason for this is also my contribution to the Historians' Convention (Historikertag) later this year. My basic question is whether Wikipedia is a good starting point for a historic topic, following the research of early deceased Swiss historian Peter Haber.
Haber made his point i.a. at the example of [[de:Frühmittelalter]] (early middle ages) in 2010. That article, he complained, contained no real inaccuracies, but still it was useless for a student. No good structure, some facts put one after the other etc. His explanation: if you want to write an article about a person, say about Henri Dunant, you take some biographies and write from his birth to his death and legacy. That's relatively easy and can be done by any good writer. But for a comprehensive article on the early middle ages, you must be a skilled historian very familiar with the period.
(I now experience the same with a series of Wikipedia articles I write about a certain period in German history. Just following the (older) standard reference works would simply not make me happy, not be a really valuable contribution to Wikipedia. With (nearly) every new work I get from the inter library loan I see that it is good to wait with publication of an article until I have together the set of works I deem necessary. - I consider to write a kind of report about this series.)
It would be great to have a set of criteria for an article typology, based partially on function of the article (overview, or registration of an item in a row etc.) and the inner quality (structure, comprehensiveness, based on literature etc.).
Kind regards Ziko
2014-06-10 14:34 GMT+02:00 Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se:
My starting point have been the newly created articles on svwp. They will represent the usual bunch of football playser, tv-stars, computergames, films etc where svwp are behind most versions but where enwp is
excellent.
The interesting comparisons comes from the next levels of articles that
can
be almost anything, a footballstadium in Kazan Russia, an albanian poet,
a
church in Venize, a specie with unclear taxonomy, the american solider
who
perhaps deserted etc. In these cases I only often find a corresponding article in enwp, but also very often (around 20%) I find it in another version and no presence in enwp.
And when enwp is not giving me support, I most often find support in eswp and frwp, sometimes in dewp, but almost never in ptwp. For exemple taxanomical threes with name in native and latin is about the weakest in ptwp. But I can be wrong and I would love to be part in a more complete research on Q comparisons for the different versions
Anders
Juliana Bastos Marques skrev 2014-06-10 14:06:
This topic comes in handy for my research on Featured Articles in WP:PT. Maybe some of you may remember my request a little while ago about
studies
on Wikipedias other than English. Well, not that I believe that the
Featured
Article requirements are a good evaluation per se, in terms of quality of content.
Anders, what are the articles you evaluated? I'm curious to find out what was so bad in the Portuguese Wikipedia. Indeed, there are many problems there, but I'm surprised to hear that it looks so bad. I know it's a
drop in
the ocean, but I've been fixing some new articles that are translations
from
bad English ones - which look good, but analyzing the content reveals
many
problems.
Juliana.
On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
Thanks for answer
Your answer confirm my "fear", that focus is almost completly to en:wp
and
how it is compared with an ideal perfect Q
My interest and what I believe the movement need before we dig into next round of strategy round is *what versions are dysfunctional. These represent a risk for the
movement
as they can jeoprdaize the brand name, as they are not living up to
basic Q
(and NPOV) *what can we learn from each other, why are some better in some aspects and worse in others?
I would recommend a research approach much more basic just collecting
some
few data on each version (and forget about enwp)
Anders
Heather Ford skrev 2014-06-10 13:09:
Hi Anders,
Yes, it's a great question! Mark Graham and I are currently working on a project around how to determine quality within and between Wikipedias
and
I've been looking around for literature. I'm only just starting the literature review but I've found some interesting studies by Callahan & Herring (2011) [1] and Stvilia, Al-Faraj, and Yi (2009) [2]. The
majority of
quality studies, we find, have been done on English Wikipedia (starting
with
the famous 2005 Nature study) but there have been few studies that
assess of
quality between languages. If you find anything else, let us know!
Thanks!
Best, heather.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21577/abstract
[2]
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/200773220_Issues_of_cross-contextual...
Heather Ford Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Programme EthnographyMatters | Oxford Digital Ethnography Group http://hblog.org | @hfordsa
On 10 June 2014 07:58, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se
wrote:
(reposted from Wikimedia-i)
I have several times asked for a professional quality study of our different language versions, but not seen it exist or being done,
perhaps
you know more on this list?. before we start the strategy work I
believe we
should have basic facts on the table like this one
I therefor list here my subjective impression after daily looking into the different version for 5-15 articles (new ones being created on
sv.wp) (I
list them in order how often I use them to calibrate the svwp
articles).
enwp- a magnitude better then any other. main weakeness are articles on marginal subjects that seems to be allowed to exist there, even if
rather
bad, and without templates (noone cares to patrol these?)
eswp - a very good version, which in the general discussion are not getting appropriate credit
dewp - good when the articles exist, but many serious holes. Is the elitist way of running it, discouraging new editors in non obvious
subjects
(that after time passes gets very relevant)? frwp - also good, but somewhat scattered quality both in coverage and
the
different articles (even in same subject area) nlwp - very good coverage in the geographic subjects, decent quality on articles but limited "world" coverage in areas like biographies itwp - good articles but a bit italiancentered,
nowp - small but decent articles. Their short focused articletext sometimes give more easyaccessed knowledge then an overly long one in
other
languages
ptwp - the real disappointment. it is among the top ten in volume and accesses but clearly missing a lot, and even existing articles are
uneven. I
now use it even less then Ukrainian and Russian which I use very
seldom as
the different alphabet makes it hard to understand the article content
dawp,fiwp and plwp -Ok but only used by me for articles related to the country
(arabic, chinese and japanese I almost never use, too complicated)
(I also use some smaller ones like sqwp , in these versions I have seen serious quality problems not to be found in any of the above ones, I
am not
sure they even have basic patrolling in place)
Anders
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