[Foundation-l] depth

[Michael Peel]

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 at gmail.com>:
>>> 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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