On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, I'd like to undertake a more thorough survey of wikipedia referencing standards, but I've started with a quick "pilot" study.
Methodology: Click "random article". Discard results which are not articles. Count the number of "external links", "references", "paragraphs".
Terms: A bit fuzzy, I'm treating a web page which gives more information as an "external link", and a page or book or whatever which is claimed to be the source of the information (or is clearly the source) as a "reference". Paragraphs are, well, paragraphs, but it must be said that longer articles generally have longer paragraphs than shorter ones do. So lines would probably be better...
Preliminary results: Sample size:30 pages, of which 17 were stubs.
Number with no links: 21 Number with no references: 24 Average number of links: 0.67 Average number of references: 0.54
I found very few book references, one of which was patently false ("James Maxwell's book of James Maxwells not as cool as me, by James Maxwell"). Similarly a list of newspaper articles turned out to all have been written by the subject (a journalist). One page (out of 30) actually gave ISBN references (Chepstow Bridge).
This compares reasonably well with the results of my survey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100): about 15% of all articles are sourced. My methodology was a little different, as I counted anything in a "references" section as a reference, while inline links were collectively counted as one reference.
I'm still working on a survey of biography articles, but preliminary results are that slightly fewer biographies are sourced, but ones that are sourced tend to have more sources.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]