On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100 Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm, something that strikes me looking at those results is that on several categories Wikipedia seems to do worse on the "easy" topics but better on the "hard" ones. I don't know if I'm just imagining it, and it could just be a coincidence, but that seems like an interesting finding (were there any graphs in the article? one could probably construct a graph that demonstrated patterns like that).
I have done a count for it, and it doesn't seem that Wikipedia scores consistently worse on 'easy' topics. In fact, Wikipedia scores about equally (average about 3.5) on all three difficulties. Brockhaus scores similarly in the easy and hard categories, but worse in the intermediate one. Encarta is equal to Brockhaus in the easy and intermediate categories, but failing clearly on the hard subjects - especially because of 6 zeroes.
Here are the numbers (for each encyclopedia and difficulty category the number of 0/1/2/3/4/5 scores):
EP easy: 1/2/0/5/9/5, total 78 (average 3.5) EP medium: 4/0/2/4/8/4, total 68 (average 3.1) EP hard: 6/2/1/6/4/3, total 50 (average 2.3)
BH easy: 0/0/4/6/6/6, total 84 (average 3.8) BH medium: 4/0/4/5/5/4, total 63 (average 2.9) BH hard: 1/0/3/7/5/6, total 77 (average 3.5)
WP easy: 1/1/5/2/3/10, total 82 (average 3.7) WP medium: 1/0/4/4/6/7, total 79 (average 3.6) WP hard: 2/0/1/7/6/6, total 77 (average 3.5)
Still, there is _something_ true in what you say. Wikipedia's scores on easy subjects seem to be more spread out than on the medium and hard subjects. There are more 5s but also more 2s. On the other hand, Wikipedia's scores on hard subjects show a general content of quality - only one 2 and no 1s among 20 subjects that at least had something.
Maybe it has something to do with the Wiki method of working on on one another's texts. Maybe the more difficult texts are mostly work of one or two people, with the rest only acting as a copy-editor. Apparently those are giving good work. On the easier subjects, 'everyone' thinks he/she can write something, which can have both positive and negative effects. The positive one is the "cooperative editing" effect: The article gets constantly improved and added upon, with many small parts leading to one great article. The negative one is that the first version may have been written by someone who does not know the subject very well, or is not a good writer. This may lead to a poor structure of the text, which is not easily improved upon. Also, when the improvement is better done by rewriting than changing the existing material, those who know more about the subject might go write their own piece on more specialist subjects instead. Perhaps it would be interesting to compare Wikipedia's notes to the edit history of the pages.
Andre Engels