On Wednesday 14 December 2005 18:27, Jakob Voss wrote: Agreed, though its a lot of work to get expert content reviews -- as Nupedia shows! :) The other interesting thing was that the two sources have a strong correlation in errors: http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/nature-wp-v-eb?showcomments…

It is in Wikinews, as "A Nature investigation finds Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries" http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/A_Nature_investigation_finds_Wikipedia_comes_cl… It and other comparisons might be of merit for the Foundation website. Also, it was discussed on the wikipedia-l mailing list that Britannica's articles were usually shorter, and thus the mistakes were actually a greater percentage of the information. Nick Moreau zanimum On 12/15/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- If you want a Gmail account invite, or ten, just ask...

On 12/15/05, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: As I have no first-hand experience with such work, I would be interested in assisting such an effort, but could not do it justice without guidance.

On 12/16/05, Jeremy Dunck <jdunck(a)gmail.com> wrote: There's a small "Permanent link" hyperlink in the sidebar when you're looking at the current rev of an article; though most readers may not know it's there. Is that what you mean, only more prominent? ++SJ

I predict the next print encyclopedia will be published in Brittany, and every edition will be called the Millennium-something edition until at least the 22nd century. SJ ( you may avoid the spelling issue altogether by referring to EB and every encyclopedia simply as "a work of disorder and destruction" -- a distinguished pedigree to which Wikipedia may also lay claim. "no original work.. has been more depreciated, ridiculed and calumniated. It has been called chaos, nothingness, the Tower of Babel, a work of disorder and destruction, the gospel of Satan..." -- Pierre Lanfrey on Wikip^B^B^B^B the French Encyclopedie ) On 12/16/05, Mathias Schindler <neubau(a)presroi.de> wrote: -- ++SJ

On 12/16/05, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. The natural tendency is to copy whatever's in the address bar, so you have to overcome that. The W3C does a nice job of versioning their documents. e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1 Of course, it could be less prominent than the W3 treatment, but that's the idea.

I have cited Lih in some of my work.... but... I find it problematic to use number of edits and number of authors (quantitative date) as indicators of content quality. I'm willing to believe that these are probably, in most cases, indicators of improvement, but that's a huge assumption. To make this case, I think some kind of qualitative analysis is necessary to demonstrate that the article QUALITY improves by some set of standards and we'd expect that these results will be correlated with number of authors/number of edits. If anyone wants to collaborate on something like this, I might have 15 or 20 minutes free in spring. ;-) Andrea (ELC Lab, GA Tech, http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc) On 12/16/05, Jeremy Dunck <jdunck(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Exactly! I think that's what I just proposed. :-) Or, instead of open ratings, you could use some sample of articles and ask third-party experts to rate them along various dimensions of quality (accuracy, comprehensiveness, accessible writing, etc.) -andrea On 12/16/05, Dirk Riehle <dirk(a)riehle.org> wrote:

There's a lot of research in education on peer assessment-- I remember reading studies that show students' assessment of peers' work is similar to that of teachers' assessments, *when they are given guidelines.* So I'd expect that the interface design (how well expectations are communicated in the design of the rating system) will influence how well newbies are able to contribute in meaningful ways. -andrea On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:

At 08:55 -0500 16/12/05, Jimmy Wales wrote: So, how does that differ from a member of the "public" editing by correcting an article or musing in the talk page? Action research anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research -- Gordo (aka LoopZilla) gordon.joly(a)pobox.com http://pobox.com/~gordo/ http://www.loopzilla.org/

A note of caution... My understanding of action research is that it is BIG -- involves organizational change on a large scale and a lot of time to go longitudinal work. If you want to do it right, it's not anyone's side project. And I always prefer to do it right. ;-) I humbly suggest that a well-scoped, narrowly targeted correlational study (or set of studies) would be the next step for pursuing the quality-quantity connection. Even if one were to attempt action research to understand the Wikipedia community and the design of the rating system, I'm wondering if it wouldn't more like a design experiment/design study, which is an approach that draws on action research but (in my understanding) is focused more on developing theories of human behavior and cognition and principles to inform the design of artifacts like social and educational software. Coincidentally, understanding the nuanced relationship between these approaches is already on my to-do list, since I just started a three-year design study! Both of these approaches are complex and I would hesitate to undertake anything on such a scale without the input of a researcher well-versed in these methods and a detailed proposal for moving forward. If someone has the time for this scale of project, wonderful. If everyone is trying to squeeze it in among other big projects, maybe not the best approach because my prediction is that we won't end up with anything quality enough to matter. -andrea On 12/17/05, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss(a)nichtich.de> wrote:

Excellent! I hope you will be submitting a paper then to WikiSym 2006 on this. :-) Dirk At 16.12.2005, Andrea Forte wrote:

Well, as ever, pinning down measures of "quality" could be one place to start. We all know it when we see it... but what does quality mean? Andrea's dimensions of accuracy, comprehensiveness, and accessible writing are certainly major -- and I would add whether the article is referenced, has images and so on, with number of edits as one dimension. The problem, of course, is measuring something so subjective. different measures of quality are more important to different groups (anons v. wikipedians v. outside experts, and so on). Does accuracy matter more to some groups than others? Writing style? The Nature article mentioned that some of the reviewers thought the Wikipedia articles were difficult to get through, even if they were accurate, but no mention was made of the Brittanica's writing style. And yeah, I'll have about half an hour free in the spring myself :) and would also be interested in working on something like this. Incidentally, the sidebar permanent link doesn't show up in all skins. -- phoebe / brassratgirl