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_information_quality_evaluation_-_The_case_of_Arabic_English_and_Korean_Wikipedia/file/60b7d51ae682e9912a.pdf
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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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>>> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>>
>>
>>
>>
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