Wikipedia now has more than 50,000 pages (28,000 articles), and the 1,000 most recent changes were made in the last 5 days.
But is there any way to judge/measure/monitor the quality of the contribution as volume grows? Are new articles still written on new topics of general interest, or do more and more cover obscure topics? Do more duplicates appear? Is there any way to tell from statistics?
I guess the number of different authors that a new article attracts in its first three months could be an interesting statistical measure.
Hi Lars!
Wikipedia now has more than 50,000 pages (28,000 articles)
Cool, 22,000 user pages! ;-)
But is there any way to judge/measure/monitor the quality of the contribution as volume grows?
The more page views an article got in the last x months, and the less it has been edited in the same time, the better is the article?
Are new articles still written on new topics of general interest,
The number of page views without edits a few days after the article was created could be a measure for the general interest. Perhaps only the visitors coming from search engines should be counted here, because older articles might have more links to them inside the WP. But this wouldn't be unfair if we assume that we have no blind spots (what I don't).
or do more and more cover obscure topics?
=> few links to it, few page views, maybe few different people that contributed to it
Is there any way to tell from statistics?
I guess the number of different authors that a new article attracts in its first three months could be an interesting statistical measure.
Yes!
A differnt thing, but I'd also like to know which sites the visitors of the German WP come from. I've seen such a page on the English WP somewhere and found it quite interesting.
Kurt
On 6/6/02 8:11 AM, "Kurt Jansson" jansson@gmx.net wrote:
But is there any way to judge/measure/monitor the quality of the contribution as volume grows?
The more page views an article got in the last x months, and the less it has been edited in the same time, the better is the article?
I'd be skeptical about this metric being equivalent to quality, since there are so many factors that influence the ratio of views to edits. Quality is certainly one, but so is: *) ease of editing *) nature of the visitor to the page
That is, if the interface makes it difficult to edit the article, people won't edit it whether or not it's of inferior quality. E.g. slowdowns.
I'd rather say that the above metric measures something like "article stasis", which has both good and bad qualities. Most of the time stasis is good, but it's important to remember it's not perfection.
I feel like I'm taking way to philosophical a tone here by speaking in generalities--all I mean is that everything bears improvement.
Also, sometimes a high edit-to-view ratio is an excellent metric of quality, in particular (of course) in the case of current-events articles.
--tc
On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, The Cunctator wrote:
I'd be skeptical about this metric being equivalent to quality,
I think nobody has an easy answer to the definition of quality. Traditional (non-editable) websites like Amazon's let visitors rank the contents (was this book good? was this review useful?). Wikipedia lets readers rewrite the articles they don't like. The very idea of "ranking" the contents becomes obsolete.
On 6/12/02 2:35 PM, "Lars Aronsson" lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, The Cunctator wrote:
I'd be skeptical about this metric being equivalent to quality,
I think nobody has an easy answer to the definition of quality. Traditional (non-editable) websites like Amazon's let visitors rank the contents (was this book good? was this review useful?). Wikipedia lets readers rewrite the articles they don't like. The very idea of "ranking" the contents becomes obsolete.
That's a great point. This should be in the FAQ.
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