Several collaborators and I are preparing to expand on previous work to automatically ascertain the quality of Wikipedia articles on the English Wikipedia (presented at Wikimania '07 [0]). PageRank is Google's hallmark quality metric, and the foundation actually has access to these numbers through the Google Webmaster Tools website. If a foundation representative were to create a Google account and verify that they were a "webmaster," they could download the PageRank for every article on the English Wikipedia in a convenient tabular format. This data would likely serve as a fantastic predictor. I would also like to compare the Google-computed PageRank to the PageRank computed via Wikipedia's internal link structure. I don't see any privacy implications in releasing this data. It also doesn't seem to help spammers much, as they already know the pages that have a very high PageRank, and we include rel="nofollow" on outbound links. Nonetheless, I would of course be willing to keep the data private.
<br><br>This would only take a few minutes if it were approved. Is anyone out there who has the power to make it happen?<br><br>Cheers :)<br>Brian<br><br>[0] <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/wikimania2007/d/d3/RassbachPincockMingus07.pdf">
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/wikimania2007/d/d3/RassbachPincockMingus07.pdf</a><br><br>