Hi Mark, Just wanted to say "keep up the good work". This is really brilliant. Well, not necessarily the results, but, you know.
Do you have any ideas for a next stage? Should we look at targeting specific kinds of articles? Instead of selecting randomly, choosing say 20 highly controversial topics, 20 former featured articles, 20 pop culture, 20 maths/science...etc etc?
How can I help?
Steve
On 3/1/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
I've finished my review of the 100 randomly-selected articles I surveyed back in November: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100 Of the original 100, seven have been deleted, and another three have been turned into redirects.
Over the past three months, there were 1,121 edits to the articles on the list, giving a mean of 11.56 edits per non-deleted article.
Not much happens on most articles: of the 93 articles remaining in the survey, the median number of edits was 3. Nine articles were completely unchanged since November, and all but 18 of the articles had fewer than ten changes. About 99% of the edits were minor things: adding interwiki links, fiddling with categories and stub tags, adjusting wikilinks, and spelling/grammar fixes. Only a few edits added a paragraph or more of information.
At the other extreme of editing are the four articles with 100 or more edits. Unfortunately, this does not neccessarily translate into an increase in article content. Of the four articles, only [[Midfielder]] was expanded significantly. [[Aleksandr Pushkin]] and [[Lawrenceville School]] were cleaned up, with some addition of information. [[List of Barney & Friends stage shows]] merely suffered prolonged vandalism.
Overall, quality has improved, but not by much. Out of the original 20 substubs, five have been deleted, and four have improved to "stub" status. Three articles originally classified as "low" have improved to "good". None of the stubs has improved beyond stub status, and there are still no articles considered "high" quality. No article declined significantly in quality.
The sourcing situation hasn't changed much: two articles gained sources, while one article is now unsourced. [[General Semantics]], the messiest, most over-referenced article in the previous round of the survey, gained another three sources, for a total of 17. Fortunately, it also gained a great deal of improvement.
The image situation has changed significantly. Originally, free images outnumbered non-free ones by 2:1, with only a few images of unknown copyright situation. The ratio of free to non-free images hasn't changed, and the total number of images has gone up. Of the six unsourced images in the original survey, all of them have been sourced or removed. However, there are also 17 images with apparently-incorrect free-license tags: 16 images from Commons with disputed PD-self tags, and a GFDL tag on an image that is probably not eligable for copyright.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l