Here's another challenge. If you keep a list of the articles you started, go through them and make sure than they have external links or references, even if they are stubs. Gotta start somewhere - might as well start on your own stuff
Ian (Guettarda)
On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
[also originally sent yesterday but didn't seem to get through the moderator, perhaps due to my mail server?]
Hi all, I'd like to undertake a more thorough survey of wikipedia referencing standards, but I've started with a quick "pilot" study.
Methodology: Click "random article". Discard results which are not articles. Count the number of "external links", "references", "paragraphs".
Terms: A bit fuzzy, I'm treating a web page which gives more information as an "external link", and a page or book or whatever which is claimed to be the source of the information (or is clearly the source) as a "reference". Paragraphs are, well, paragraphs, but it must be said that longer articles generally have longer paragraphs than shorter ones do. So lines would probably be better...
Preliminary results: Sample size:30 pages, of which 17 were stubs.
Number with no links: 21 Number with no references: 24 Average number of links: 0.67 Average number of references: 0.54
I found very few book references, one of which was patently false ("James Maxwell's book of James Maxwells not as cool as me, by James Maxwell"). Similarly a list of newspaper articles turned out to all have been written by the subject (a journalist). One page (out of 30) actually gave ISBN references (Chepstow Bridge).
Conclusions: None yet, really, since the methodology isn't very solid and the sample set is small. But notably: More than half the articles were stubs. Hardly any articles had any real "references". Most of the external links were band websites, company websites etc. Of the few refernces, one was blatantly false and a few were "bad". So it's probably a little early to be claiming that all material added to Wikipedia MUST be sourced or it will be removed. Because based on this, only around 15% of Wikipedia would survive. (Which is more than I would have predicted).
Any suggestions for improved methodology? It might be nice to harness the wikipedia population to collect some more general article quality metrics...
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l