Perhaps a better thing to quantify is the usefulness, rather than the
quality? That is, ask the people reading and using articles how
useful the article has been to them?
Or, more generally, ask them to rate articles on a scale of 1 to N,
where N is e.g. 5.
By doing that, you can learn about the distribution of ratings (==
quality/usefulness/???) within a wikipedia, or within a subsample of
the wikipedia (e.g. "featured" or "good" content). It provides a
complementary statistic to article ratings, which are generally done
by editors. It also highlights articles where we as editors think
we've done a good job, but perhaps readers don't. Add in the
evolution of the rating with time (possibly with a half-life for an
individual rating) and you get to see the direction that the
article's heading in. It's a simple, unobtrusive, commonly used tool
that's much more likely to be used than any type of survey, yet is
direct from the users rather than being an inferred quantity.
(This isn't my idea; if I remember correctly, it's
[[en:User:Majorly]]'s. I hope he doesn't mind me passing it on. I've
just added my slant, and hopefully inserted it at a useful point in
this discussion.)
Mike
On 23 Mar 2009, at 20:26, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
Дана Monday 23 March 2009 20:00:06 Thomas Dalton
написа:
2009/3/23 Mark Williamson
<node.ue(a)gmail.com>om>:
There are many situations in which it could be
useful to have a
way to
quantify the quality, rather than just number of articles, of a
Wikipedia edition. If the whole formula is flawed, we should find a
better one.
Step one: Define "quality".
If you give me an unambiguous, uncontroversial definition of quality,
I'll find you a formula for it.
It doesn't have to be unambiguous or uncontroversial, it only has
to be
useful.
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