My experience is that pretty much all Wikimedians care about quality, though some have different, even diametrically opposed views as to what quality means and which things are cosmetic or crucial.

My experience of the sadly dormant death anomaly project was that people react positively to being told "here is a list of anomalies on your language wikipedia" especially if those anomalies are relatively serious. My experience of edits on many different languages is that wikipedians appreciate someone who improves articles, even if you don't speak their language. Dismissing any of our thousand wikis as a "black box" is I think less helpful.

One of the great opportunities of Wikidata is to do the sort of data driven anomaly finding that we pioneered with the death anomalies report. But we always need to remember that there are cultural difference between wikis, and not just in such things as the age at which we assume people are dead. Diplomacy is a useful skill in cross wiki work.

~~~~

On 20 November 2015 at 07:18, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia. Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach.

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia quality because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve.

There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality issue both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how to deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if at all.

I blogged about it..
Thanks,
     GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikipedia.html

_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l