On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 4:32 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Eh, wrong link ... http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/01/wikipedia-20-error-rate.html
On 25 January 2016 at 17:29, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, I regularly blog. It was mentioned in one of my blogposts [1].. By the
way
the obvious would be to do some research yourself. Paper tigers [2] are those tigers that rely on what others have to say, Thanks., GerardM
[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/01/wikipedia-recovery-and-mental-hea...
[2] http://www.letusdiy.org/uploads/userup/0911/3000041GC2.jpg
Gerard,
You say in your January 2016 blog post,
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The article on the Spearman Medal is a case in point. This medal is conferred by the British Psychological Society to psychologists. There were 19 links and two were wrong. One link was to a soccer and one to a football player. The award is conferred since 1965 so there ought to be quite a number of red links
With two sportsmen attributed to winning the Spearman Medal there was an error rate of 20%.
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Looking at the current version of the [[Spearman Medal]] article,[1] last touched in August 2014 (i.e. well before your blog post), I find it contains 20 (not 19) blue links in its List of medal winners (along with a bunch of red links).
Looking at the blue links, I find only one soccer/football player (Richard Crisp), not two. However, there is also a research climatologist specialising in viticulture (Gregory V. Jones).
These two would seem quite obviously to be wrong, given that the Spearman Medal is given to psychologists. So I agree with you that at least two blue links lead to the wrong person.
I don't agree with your percentage calculation: if 2 out of 20 blue links lead to the wrong person, that makes an error rate of 10% (not 20%).
I note that only two of the names in the list have references. That's just as bad as Wikidata. :)
The saving grace is that at least the article cites a British Psychological Society webpage in its lead where an official list of medal winners[2] is linked. Frankly, I would consider that page a better reference than the Wikipedia page. It's good to see that it outranks the Wikipedia page in search engines.
Speaking more broadly, I don't think you'll find me disagreeing with you that Wikipedia quality leaves much to be desired. I have written plenty about Wikipedia's reliability problems.
However, I consider the requirement for reliable sources to be a key factor in whatever quality improvement there has been in Wikipedia. Moreover, the presence of sources very often gives readers access to more reliable material than Wikipedia itself (as indeed is the case in the Spearman Medal article). That is useful.
In my view, much of Wikipedia has been and continues to be substandard. But without references, Wikidata's reliability problems are likely to be even greater than those of Wikipedia.
Andreas
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spearman_Medal&oldid=62073568... [2] http://www.bps.org.uk/what-we-do/bps/history-psychology-centre/history-socie...