On 17 April 2014 13:46, John Byrne <john(a)bodkinprints.co.uk> wrote:
<snip>
Most of Charles' factors below relate better to
views and
controversialness than article quality, and
article quality has a limited ability to increase views, as study of FAs
before and after expansion will show.
I was of course giving the most brief and telegraphic indications, just so
as to unpick the acronym. A much fuller discussion is in Chapter 4 of How
Wikipedia Works, so I hardly need go into all those things here and now.
Personally I'd think the lack of 1 to say 4 dominant editors in the stats
is a more reliable warning sign than "A single editor, or essentially only
one editor with
tweaking" in most subjects. Nothing is more characteristic of a popular
but poor article than a huge list of contributors, all with fewer than 10
edits.
Depends what you are talking about. The point here, and similarly in other
places, though, is that it might be good or it might be bad to have a
single editor. "More research required", as usual, but you are then
researching something definite, and this is what we all do: check out a
user page. A machine could at least make a rough guess, and work has been
done on reputation systems.
The "single-purpose account" is a warning flag, and such editing tends to
go with article creation about fringe things where others may hardly
bother. As I hinted, there can be false positives with single editors, but
it is a useful attack on the issue, surely.
The multiple editor phenomenon you are talking about is indeed
characteristic of mediocre articles. We have to recall that "good" articles
make up less than 1% of Wikipedia's articles.
Sadly, the implied notion (at T for Traffic below)
that fairly high views
automatically lead to increased quality is very dubious - we have plenty of
extremely bad articles that have had by now millions of viewers who have
between them done next to nothing to improve the now-ancient text.
No, my point was as before, really. Very low traffic and very high traffic
tell you something. Mid-range traffic doesn't sort the sheep from the
goats.
There is also the question of what use the results of the exercise will
be.
Oh, I agree. But the current "system" does seem skewed towards recognition
of better content, rather than dealing purposefully with the worst 10%.
Picking up the latter in some mechanical way is always worth considering.
Charles