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.
It's the area under the curve that matters, not whether it *eventually* gets rewritten.
So time_in_article * number_of_unique_characters is probably a fairly good metric.
And you could multiply by the article hit rate to get an even better metric I expect.
Whereas you can get very high edit counts by many well-known ways, even breaking an edit down into many sub-edits can multiply up edit counts, or just doing lots of vandalism reverts.
It is quite common for the final push for an article to be featured to
involve different editors to those that brought it to the current state. And that often involves stepping back, taking a long hard look at the article and the sources, and then ripping up large quantities of the article and rewriting and rebalancing things.
So you're saying that sometimes people rewrite articles, and this contradicts my point how?
Carcharoth
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-Ian Woollard