Ingo Frost wrote:
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.
Journalists aren't searching for knowledge - they just want to tell a story.
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?
The only serious and promising attemt I know of is Andreas Brändle's Masters thesis: * http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-AB1 * http://editthispage.blogspot.com/
Ulrich Fuchs did a little test on vandalising articles: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedistik/Vandalismusanf%C3%A4llig...
His approach is not fully scientific but still better then any Journalist's or Wikipedian's attemt. See also http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794
Greetings, Jakob