It would be good to extend the research of War of 1812 to non-English Wikipedias. I've had a quick look and it is surprising how many of the articles 'pretty good', but none are very good. I think that there is a depth level at which non-English writers say 'I could easily add more, but the [non-English] article is good enough; if you want more detail you'll almost certainly know English language and should go read the English article. My time is better spent expanding another [non-English] article that isnt yet good enough.' John Vandenberg. sent from Galaxy Note On Oct 29, 2012 3:28 AM, "Steven Walling" <swalling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:49:22 +0700, John Vandenberg wrote: I have never hear of (and I doubt very much the existence of) Russian wikipedians who would translate the articles on War of 1812 from English Wikipedia rather than to write them themselves. (I am talking now about the events which happened in Europe; others may be less known, and thus more attractive for translation). Cheers Yaroslav

On Mon, 29 Oct 2012 08:13:48 +1100, Kerry Raymond wrote: I actually have quite the opposite impression. I think most of the top contributors are actually creating content. I myself am somewhere in the top 3000, and 90% of my edits are in the article space. I would be interested to see a study on this if it exists. With this I agree. Cheers Yaroslav

I believe we have a number of studies which have shown that majority of content was written by the small minority of most active editors. This does not invalidate the comment about automated editing; bottom line - most of anything on Wikipedia, i.e. both content and non-content support infrastructure, was and is being done by a small group of very dedicated people. -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 10/28/2012 5:57 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:

Anonymous or low activity editors can contribute high quality content, certainly, but quantity (and by extrapolation, most quality) comes from registered ones. (Case in point: no GA or FA can be written by an anon, or a SPE; and most of the primary contributors to those articles likely have many high quality edits to a large number of other articles). -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 10/29/2012 12:49 PM, Felipe Ortega wrote:

Well, this is based on my experience as GA author and reviewer. I have never seen an IP successfully nominate an article (I did see nominations once or twice, they failed quickly, as the articles were not up to GA level and IP never came back). And of course, I have yet to see an IP GA reviewer (that is not a troll or a useless if good faithed newbie). If you are aware of any successful GANs were the primary author was an IP, I'd like to look at them. I'd hypothesize that: * they are a tiny percentage of the whole (if we have more than a 10 GAs written by anons in our pool of 15,000 or so, I'd be very surprised; if more than 100 I am willing to eat a hat, or more constructively, I'll write a DYK (if possible) on a subject of your choice :D); * majority of anon-written GAs are old, have been already delisted, or would not pass a modern GA review (and if nominated for a current GA review, would fail, due to not meeting criteria and the primary author being unreachable to address the issues raised). -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 10/29/2012 4:30 PM, Laura Hale wrote:

Stein, K., & Hess, C. (2007). Does it matter who contributes: A study on featured articles in the German Wikipedia. In HT '07: Proceedings of the eighteenth conference on hypertext and hypermedia (pp. 171-174). ACM. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1286240.128629 And using the same method from Stein & Hess, we can draw similar conclusions for all the largest Wikipedias, specially in the case of English. http://felipeortega.net/sites/default/files/thesis-jfelipe.pdf (see section 4.5, starting on page 129). Best, Felipe. >On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote: >Well, this is based on  my experience as GA author and reviewer. I have never seen an IP successfully nominate an article (I did see nominations once or twice, they failed quickly, as the articles were not up to GA level and IP never came back). And of course, I have yet to see an IP GA reviewer (that is not a troll or a useless if good faithed newbie). If you are aware of any successful GANs were the primary author was an IP, I'd like to look at them. I'd hypothesize that: >>* they are a tiny percentage of the whole (if we have more than a       10 GAs written by anons in our pool of 15,000 or so, I'd be very       surprised; if more than 100 I am willing to eat a hat, or more       constructively, I'll write a DYK (if possible) on a subject of       your choice :D);       delisted, or would not pass a modern GA review (and if nominated       for a current GA review, would fail, due to not meeting criteria       and the primary author being unreachable to address the issues       raised). >>>>-- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski >>On 10/29/2012 4:30 PM, Laura Hale wrote: >>>>>>>>>On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote: >>>>>Anonymous or low activity editors can contribute high quality content, certainly, but quantity (and by extrapolation, most quality) comes from registered ones. >>>>>>>(Case in point: no GA or FA can be written by an anon, or a           SPE; and most of the primary contributors to those articles           likely have many high quality edits to a large number of other           articles). >>>>>>What is this based on?  I've seen a number of articles written by       IP addresses that have been GA quality articles.  Anyone can       nominate a GA.  (I could have nominated them for instance.)  Rules       may prohibit their nomination at FA, but rules at GA do not       prohibit articles primarily written by IP addresses from being       nominated. >>>>>-- >>>twitter: purplepopple >>>blog: ozziesport.com >>>>>>>>>>>_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l >>>_______________________________________________ >>Wiki-research-l mailing list >>Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >>https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l >>>_______________________________________________ >Wiki-research-l mailing list >Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Well, I don't think that the real discrepancy lays between IPs and users. Registration is purely a matter of formality : as you get acquainted with Wikipedia as an IP, you are likely to contemplate the advantages of having a unique identity. It is not that IPs never write FAs, but that, most of the time, they finally go through the registration process before finishing their work. Yet, we can perhaps draw a reliable distinction between occasional and (relatively) permanent editors. The first one are rather passing by, writing only the stuff they are interested in, going away from wiki once they feel tired of it, possibly coming back whenever they feel like it. The second one go extensively beyond their initial scope of edition and get to assume the current general affairs of the community. Therefore, does occasional editors matter ? I should say yes. For instance, on the French wikipedia some new editor did a brilliant job on [[Napoléon III]]. Once the article became an FA, he stopped being active : to him, its main, ponctual, work was over. Le 30 oct. 2012 à 20:59, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> a écrit :

I agree, having a high number of edit does not signify creating high quality content - it may only attest to the high use of semi-automated tools for minor edits. I also don't dispute that anon's can contribute high quality content, and they do a lot of edits. My point was: * anon's don't contribute significantly to most content on Wikipedia that gets peer reviewed (as Pierre noted, by that time they've probably registered anyway); * hence majority of Wikipedia's GA+ content is not written by anonymous editors (but the GA+ content is only a small percentage of Wikipedia's total content); -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 10/30/2012 8:41 PM, Laura Hale wrote:

I think this conversation isn't going anywhere useful because everyone is using the same words but with different meanings. In particular "quality" ... Edits can do a range of things (and often more than 1). The edits might relate to: * the information content of an article (add/edit/remove propositions -- facts if you prefer -- about the topic, e.g. Fred Smith was born in 1770) * the references (add/edit/delete the external sources that support a proposition) * the presentation of the article, e.g. Structure of the article, spelling, grammar, appropriately nuanced selection among synonyms, clear prose, conformance to the Manual of Style, wikifying, etc Each of these can have some kind of quality metrics attached (although most will be somewhat subjective -- "an article in the New York post is a better quality source than ..."). At the moment many in this conversation are using GA as the only quality metric. But I think we should see this as a goal not a binary "quality / not quality" metric. To achieve GA, clearly you need facts, verification, and presentation all in both quantity and quality. Next who is an IP? Well, we know that IPs don't necessarily map to individual people and individual people do not map to a single IP. An IP edit might be done by someone who is a registered user (but too lazy to login -- I'm guilty of that), who may later become a registered user, or who may never be a registered user. I postulate that good faith IP edits are predominantly small edits of facts or localized edits of presentation (eg spelling). I postulate edits of logged-in users would be both large and small and involve facts, references and presentation, although clearly individual users may have their own particular profiles of edit behavior. In particular to get an article to GA, you need one (or just a few people) to polish the writing (presentation). Getting a super-readable document with many voices is very difficult. Therefore I would expect that the final push to achieve GA would inevitably involved registered users and not IPs. Also GA status is a concept and process that is very much "insider" knowledge about WP. Anonymous editors and low-activity editors are unlikely to have even heard about GA status so therefore are not going to be working toward it. Only the very active insiders would see it as their goal and therefore work towards it. So I think it is pointless to discuss contribution to quality in terms of who gets an article to GA status. I think we do better to ask the question about the quality of an edit (or the set of edits done by a particular user) in terms of whether it adds "correct" information, references that support information, improves presentation. If someone adds a "fact" and that edit is later obliterated by a rewrite of a section but the information is retained (albeit in a different presentation), the original edit was still good quality even if it doesn't survive as a string of characters. I think the use of "edit survival" to measure the quality of an edit is failing to distinguish between information content and presentation, but I acknowledge that "edit survival" is easily measured and "information content survival" is not, but be cautious about using one as the proxy for another. I think qualitative assessment of a set of randomly selected articles which analyses the contribution made by each individual edit in terms of: * the quality of the article as it was immediately before and after the edit (immediate contribution) * the quality of the article as it is today (overall contribution) Is more likely to come up with better answers to the question of the contributions of anonymous edits, relative to low activity user editors, relative to high activity user editors. For the purposes of this conversation, I am ignoring vandalism (and other bad faith behaviour) and edits to reverse them. Sent from my iPad On 01/11/2012, at 10:08 AM, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> wrote:

<quote who="Piotr Konieczny" date="Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 04:19:03PM -0400"> I'm not sure I disagree with your point but I think your evidence is unfair. Getting an article to a GA and FA is more a measure of how well somebody knows the Wikipedia rules and system and is able to jump through them. Only very active editors will even know that there is such a thing as a GA or a FA. That, alone, doesn't mean that most good encyclopedic content comes from people that do. Only that the cleanup necessary to satisfies Wikipedia's own internal guidelines does. Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill mako(a)mit.edu http://mako.cc/ Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto