On 2 October 2011 12:28, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 9:58 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 1 October 2011 18:15, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
The assumption "Presumably anything that still remains is of sufficient quality for whatever level the article is" has so much wrong with it that I don't know where to start.
No, if material lasts for a long period in an article it's highly likely to be fairly good even if it gets rewritten later; and the more material and the longer it lasts, the better.
Material lasts a long time for two reasons:
(a) It is good and lots of people have checked it and left it alone; (b) It is bad/wrong and no-one has spotted it yet and replaced it or rewritten it.
I don't see how you can devise a metric to distinguish these two case, as you would have to detect the number of people silently checking and approving something (not just reading it). Lots of quality control is *silent* and not detectable in the current metrics. It would be different if there were a way for people to mark text and say "I have this book and have checked this citation, or followed the URL and agree with what is written here". Essentially a way to detect the silent verification that often takes place.
You mean, like, umm, Flagged Revisions?
J.