Ingo Frost wrote:
I am a bit disappointed about the available material that tries to measure the quality of Wikipedia articles.
Me too, but let's all agree that it is a difficult thing to do.
(2) Political terms are sometimes very complex topics where the NPOV may not work, because there is no right nor wrong.
I think this is a serious misunderstanding of NPOV and of what it might mean _for an encyclopedia_ to be "right or wrong_.
First, not everyone believes (and I certainly don't) that on political topics there is no right nor wrong. But some do. And NPOV has to deal with all of us. The point is that we can typicall "go meta" and avoid taking a controversial stand ourselves. NPOV does not require us to choose which of two sides is right or wrong on complex topics, but rather requires us to describe the controversy.
Therefore, _for an encyclopedia_, it is quite possible to get it right (or get it wrong) even when the underlying issue is complex and not readily amenable to a final judgment.
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.
This can certainly be true in any given case. But I wonder if you aren't showing your own POV here -- I often wish articles read differently, but often -- when I'm fully honest with myself -- this is because I wish my own view were more prominently reflected, even if it should not be.
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?
I think this is a fantastic question and what I hope this list can foster.
It's an enormously difficult problem to get right, and you've identified some of the tough problems here. Despite my criticism (highly technical and based on internal jargon) of what you said about NPOV, I do think that it is quite hard to judge the quality of certain contentious articles because there is no simple "gold standard" to which we can refer.
In many cases, and I say this with full awareness that it is also not true in many other cases, our articles on contentious or controversial topics are _the best in existence_ simply because they are the _most free from bias_.
It's easy to compare a wikipedia chart of the periodic table of elements against a standard source and measure if it accurately reflects received science. It is much harder in areas where the only reliably objective presentation one can find _at all_ is in Wikipedia in the first place. :-)
This gets us into some potentially insoluble philosophical issues with measuring "quality" so what I recommend is that we remain steadfastly practical, thinking of things which we actually can measure and test.
--Jimbo