Dear Andrew Lih, dear scientific community,
I am a bit disappointed about the available material that tries to measure the quality of Wikipedia articles.
The quoted newspaper article of the Wall street journal for example just analyses technical topics but it would be a dangerous claim to assume that quality is equally distributed over the different fields and topics. But you need that claim as condition for the method of randomly picking articles and conclude for the rest.
There was another attempt to compare the Quality of Wikipedia with other Encyclopedias in the German Computer Newspaper C't with the same random approach.
(1) But there is a problem since it is a random way of choosing articles to compare or to analyse. I see some problems in non technical fields such as soft sciences (in social science for example every theory on society redefines all concepts of society on it's own: how can an encyclopedia claim to have a definition?).
(2) Political terms are sometimes very complex topics where the NPOV may not work, because there is no right nor wrong. It is often a question of opinion and majority that sometimes changes reality. I observed a discussion and an edit war on the article about Direct Democracy (in the Germen Wikipedia: article "Direkte Demokratie") that led to a loss of quality: only a minimal and weak consens survived the different opinions: the evolutionary process did not improve quality in that case.
(3) The third problem is the tendency of specific groups that lead to vandalism. There are groups that use values or ideologies and reject a neutral or scientific view (moralists, religious groups, nationalists, neocapitalists etc.). What about articles that are important for these groups? Are these article tendentious?
My question: Is there a scientific study on the quality of the Wikipedia ariticles? Does anyone work on that problems? What methods could be used to analyse the Quality?
Ingo Frost (studies Wikipedia from a social system science view)