Thanks for the feedback. One interesting point with my little test seems to be that the average quality of our content has not much improved since March (or since 2003, as far as I can remember).
A thought experiment: if we were the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch and were given Wikipedia's current content as a basis (but not the user base), what would we do? I guess we would put our energy into improving the material, i.e. rewriting/deleting/merging most of it. But we would not try to acquire more articles of that quality. (Ah wait, we ARE the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch...)
Kosebamse
On 8 Nov 2005, at 18:39, kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. One interesting point with my little test seems to be that the average quality of our content has not much improved since March (or since 2003, as far as I can remember).
What do you base this on?
A thought experiment: if we were the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch and were given Wikipedia's current content as a basis (but not the user base), what would we do? I guess we would put our energy into improving the material, i.e. rewriting/deleting/merging most of it. But we would not try to acquire more articles of that quality. (Ah wait, we ARE the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch...)
I dont know. Despite what other people seem to think there are huge areas that are missing. A lot of people find it easier to write with something to start from. I have written a few of articles from missing encyclopaedic articles (ones I knew something about) and other people have found them and improved them. So even having more stubs is useful.
Ok, just had a chance to go through your list, and yes the World of Warcraft article is fancruft. But it has been edited by 6 people. If people afre going to write this much it is hard to recommend merging.
William Roberts the first edit says "information is thin" but clearly notable. Someone will fix this one day, using a copy of "Not very eminent Victorians". The formatting will be ok then.
Reverse potential is a dab page but not in the usual style. I think thats ok.
Entertainer I agree is bogus. However it is because it is a remnant of life before categories. It and many of the linked lists need to be removed. Categories make this stuff redundant.
Gripper. Should die.
Imari porcelain is not incoherent, it makes a good effort at a difficult subject.
Diego Luna is what I would expect about a not very important actor. Reads like a copyvio actually.
Justinc
On 11/9/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
On 8 Nov 2005, at 18:39, kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
I dont know. Despite what other people seem to think there are huge areas that are missing. A lot of people find it easier to write with something to start from. I have written a few of articles from missing encyclopaedic articles (ones I knew something about) and other people have found them and improved them. So even having more stubs is useful.
From my own experience, articles are more often created than improved
as is demonstrated by the large amounts of school stubs for example. Also, the complete dismal state on the articles on "Acidity" for example makes me think improvement is not on the top of the list of enough people. Merging for example episode articles into lists or the different languages once spoken in Egypt would provide more detailed articles and help Wikipedia in the end.
The difference lies in what one calls a stub. I call something a stub when it has a basic definition and just a tad bit more to get an article on it's way. while "Bill Clinton was the President of the United States" conveys a basic meaning, I would call it a substub and request deletion on the basis of speedy deletion criterion A1. If it went on to mention his date of birth, political party and a few biographical details it would be a stub. Too many people want to create an article NOW, rather than wait for themselves to have collected sufficient information.
--Mgm
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
On 11/9/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
On 8 Nov 2005, at 18:39, kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
I dont know. Despite what other people seem to think there are huge areas that are missing. A lot of people find it easier to write with something to start from. I have written a few of articles from missing encyclopaedic articles (ones I knew something about) and other people have found them and improved them. So even having more stubs is useful.
From my own experience, articles are more often created than improved
as is demonstrated by the large amounts of school stubs for example. Also, the complete dismal state on the articles on "Acidity" for example makes me think improvement is not on the top of the list of enough people. Merging for example episode articles into lists or the different languages once spoken in Egypt would provide more detailed articles and help Wikipedia in the end.
Indeed. When something is fairly useless on its own it's best to merge the information somewhere useful.
The difference lies in what one calls a stub. I call something a stub when it has a basic definition and just a tad bit more to get an article on it's way. while "Bill Clinton was the President of the United States" conveys a basic meaning, I would call it a substub and request deletion on the basis of speedy deletion criterion A1.
To say the least, that would be a push of CSD A1 - which applies to:
Very short articles providing little or no context (e.g., "He is a funny man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way, his wife is great."). Limited content is not in itself a reason to delete if there is enough context to allow expansion.
In this case, "Bill Clinton was the President of the United States" *does* give context, and it claims notability, so it's not CSD A7.
If it went on to mention his date of birth, political party and a few biographical details it would be a stub. Too many people want to create an article NOW, rather than wait for themselves to have collected sufficient information.
But it's a wiki! You can always fix it later!
Justin Cormack wrote:
Ok, just had a chance to go through your list, and yes the World of Warcraft article is fancruft. But it has been edited by 6 people. If people afre going to write this much it is hard to recommend merging.
And there's no obvious way that I can think of to persuade these people to do something more "serious" with their time. They want to write about World of Warcraft, so that's what they'll write about. We can hold them to NPOV and all that good stuff, and that'll be fine.
It'd be a fine thing if all the authors of waaaaaay too many Pokemon articles turned their attention to more "serious" endeavors, but there's no way to make that happen.
--Jimbo
On 11/12/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
It'd be a fine thing if all the authors of waaaaaay too many Pokemon articles turned their attention to more "serious" endeavors, but there's no way to make that happen.
Well, we can hope that when they grow up and go to college and eventually move into the real world, they will continue to edit Wikipedia, and hopefully not simply to keep the Pokemon articles up to date with the latest release. Even if only a few percent of them move onto real articles, some good will come of it.
And if not, well, we'll have the best encyclopedia of anime and computer games in the world. There's something to be said for that. [[Exploding sheep]] is a fascinating article, for example.
Kelly
On 11/13/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
And if not, well, we'll have the best encyclopedia of anime and computer games in the world. There's something to be said for that. [[Exploding sheep]] is a fascinating article, for example.
And there's always the possibility that, as so many people want to *write* these articles, just some may want to _read_ them.
Just a possibility, mind.
Sam
On 11/13/05, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/13/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
And if not, well, we'll have the best encyclopedia of anime and computer games in the world. There's something to be said for that. [[Exploding sheep]] is a fascinating article, for example.
And there's always the possibility that, as so many people want to *write* these articles, just some may want to _read_ them.
Just a possibility, mind.
Sam
however if they were a little older we might have a screenshot for the older version os worms in our worms article.
-- geni
Indeed, it should never be forgotten that the target audience for encyclopedias is skewed towards younger people. Encyclopaedias have traditionally been marketed as an investment in your childs future.
Articles on Pokemon and suchlike may be of much more interest to teenagers than to many on this forum but it should never be forgotten that these things are of interest to many people.
One of the reasons for Wikipedia's success in my view is that we cover stuff that other encyclopedias don't. According to the Yahoo Buzz Index, ( http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/) the top five searches are: Paris Hilton, 50 Cent, Lost, Mariah Carey and Harry Potter.
We have articles on those topics. The traditional encyclopedias don't. That's one of the reasons why we're the most popular encyclopedia in the world.
Regards
Keith Old
Keith Old
User:Capitalistroadster
On 11/14/05, Sam Korn smoddy@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/13/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
And if not, well, we'll have the best encyclopedia of anime and computer games in the world. There's something to be said for that. [[Exploding sheep]] is a fascinating article, for example.
And there's always the possibility that, as so many people want to *write* these articles, just some may want to _read_ them.
Just a possibility, mind.
Sam _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Keith Old wrote:
Indeed, it should never be forgotten that the target audience for encyclopedias is skewed towards younger people. Encyclopaedias have traditionally been marketed as an investment in your childs future.
Articles on Pokemon and suchlike may be of much more interest to teenagers than to many on this forum but it should never be forgotten that these things are of interest to many people.
The audience for Pokémon is probably pre-teen. My 15-year old son went on to more complicated things a few years ago.
Getting kids to read is important. If our Pokémon articles accomplish that they are worth the effort of having them. Education statistics tell us that reading is a bigger problem for boys than for girls. A most significant factor in reducing that reading gap is to provide material that the boys will find interesting.
Ec
On Tue, 8 Nov 2005 kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. One interesting point with my little test seems to be that the average quality of our content has not much improved since March (or since 2003, as far as I can remember).
One detail that attracted my attention in your results was that both times that you id your test, you found exactly *5* articles were of "good" quality or better. Was this the result of an unconscious bias, or would a painstaking study show that about 25% of Wikipedia articles are satisfactory or better?
So I did my own survey of 20 articles, picked at random.
First result I found was that Kosebamse had better luck than me: of the 20 articles I found, no matter how generous I felt, I couldn't rate any of the articles I found as anything better than "satisfactory". I did check Kosebamse's ratings, & the 4 articles K rated as better than "satisfactory" were arguably good; I added 2 of them to [[WP:GA]]. But the ones I found weren't that good; I rated about 4-6 out of 20 as "satisfactory".
Two were on the cusp: [[J. Paul Getty]] was in many ways an adequate article, but most of the article was devoted to discussing a pair of events in Getty's life: the fact that he had a pay phone in his mansion at one time, & the events surrounding the kidnapping of his grandson. The narrative of his life was very thin.
The other was [[Santa Clara Drum and Bugle Corps]], to which I had a conflicted reaction: this was an article that I had a hard time imagining why anyone would bother to read it. Now before anyone thinks I would want to remove this article from Wikipedia, I will say that I would never put it on AfD, & if I found it there I would most likely defend it from deletion. However, after I read it, I was still as perplexed as I was at the beginning over why anyone would write an article about it. And that is my criticism of the article, & why I wonder if it will ever reach FAC status: the people who care about this subject have no sense for how to make the rest of us care about the topic.
But back to my original point: Kosebamse found 25% of the articles at least satisfactory. I found at worst 20%. I suspect that the number lies somewhere between the 2 numbers.
But if Kosebamse's two surveys are a fair sampling, it shows that only 25% of our articles at any time -- no matter how many there are -- would be acceptible as they stand. I find this an interesting suggestion where we need to focus our energies.
Geoff
kosebamse@gmx.net wrote
One interesting point with my little test seems to be that the average quality of our content has not much improved since March (or since 2003, as far as I can remember).
If we're talking about the _proportion of stubs_, then, yes, I can believe it is about what it ever was. You'd expect that on general grounds, if there was exponential growth.
Other interesting measures would be things like
- prevalence of red links - categorisation.
I'd guess at least 10% of articles are inadequately categorised; a first step to improvement is to get them roughly into a sorting category. I think red links do get paid attention. That would be one reason for more stubs, of course. But, again assuming exponential growth, you'd assume a model where the well-developed 'core' articles are surrounded by diffuse 'penumbra' articles, large in number. At what point this starts to 'close up' and become more uniform is anyone's guess. We are not there yet, clearly.
Charles
kosebamse@gmx.net wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. One interesting point with my little test seems to be that the average quality of our content has not much improved since March (or since 2003, as far as I can remember).
Of course this is because the volume has increased so much. I think if you took any random 20 articles and compared them to their predecessors 2 years ago, virtually _all_ articles would have improved. The only articles that might have declined in quality, I think, would be some feature articles which have now fallen into a contemporary edit war, etc.
A thought experiment: if we were the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch and were given Wikipedia's current content as a basis (but not the user base), what would we do? I guess we would put our energy into improving the material, i.e. rewriting/deleting/merging most of it. But we would not try to acquire more articles of that quality. (Ah wait, we ARE the editorial committee of an encyclopedia to be written from scratch...)
I think this is a brilliant observation. :-)
I absolutely do think that acquisition of huge numbers of additional stubs on increasingly narrow topics ought not to be a priority, and certainly ought not to be allowed to get in the way of quality improvement on existing articles.
(At the same time, of course, it's worth pointing out that there's an easy mental trap to fall into... assuming that time people are spending working on obscure fancruft could in any way be diverted into increasing the quality of other articles. That's probably not true.)
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I absolutely do think that acquisition of huge numbers of additional stubs on increasingly narrow topics ought not to be a priority, and certainly ought not to be allowed to get in the way of quality improvement on existing articles.
I agree with this, but it is still a big leap to go from discouraging these stubs to a policy of systematically deleting them. Often more energy goes into the deletion process than was ever put into creating the stub, more energy that might have been better spent in improving existing articles.
People write best about what they know best. If that happens to be about Pokémon, World of Warcraft or a local school so be it. We do not encourage these people to become better editors of more significant subjects by emphasizing the triviality of what they write. A little kindly mentoring would be more productive. Students will improve if we begin by recognizing their personal reality, and patiently working with them to bring about improvements.
Think back to your own school days and how a teacher's approach to a subject could have a life-long effect on how you would relate to that subject matter. As experienced Wikipedians we are in a position to be the teachers and mentors. Do we need to repeat the errors of those teachers whom we ourselves found least tolerable?
Ec