[WikiEN-l] [WikiEn-l] Article surveys, revisited

[Steve Bennett]

Hi Mark,
  Just wanted to say "keep up the good work". This is really
brilliant. Well, not necessarily the results, but, you know.

Do you have any ideas for a next stage? Should we look at targeting
specific kinds of articles? Instead of selecting randomly, choosing
say 20 highly controversial topics, 20 former featured articles, 20
pop culture, 20 maths/science...etc etc?

How can I help?

Steve

On 3/1/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've finished my review of the 100 randomly-selected articles I surveyed
> back in November: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100  Of the
> original 100, seven have been deleted, and another three have been turned
> into redirects.
>
> Over the past three months, there were 1,121 edits to the articles on the
> list, giving a mean of 11.56 edits per non-deleted article.
>
> Not much happens on most articles: of the 93 articles remaining in the
> survey, the median number of edits was 3. Nine articles were completely
> unchanged since November, and all but 18 of the articles had fewer than ten
> changes.  About 99% of the edits were minor things: adding interwiki links,
> fiddling with categories and stub tags, adjusting wikilinks, and
> spelling/grammar fixes.  Only a few edits added a paragraph or more of
> information.
>
> At the other extreme of editing are the four articles with 100 or more
> edits.  Unfortunately, this does not neccessarily translate into an increase
> in article content.  Of the four articles, only [[Midfielder]] was expanded
> significantly.  [[Aleksandr Pushkin]] and [[Lawrenceville School]] were
> cleaned up, with some addition of information.  [[List of Barney & Friends
> stage shows]] merely suffered prolonged vandalism.
>
> Overall, quality has improved, but not by much. Out of the original 20
> substubs, five have been deleted, and four have improved to "stub" status.
> Three articles originally classified as "low" have improved to "good".  None
> of the stubs has improved beyond stub status, and there are still no
> articles considered "high" quality.  No article declined significantly in
> quality.
>
> The sourcing situation hasn't changed much: two articles gained sources,
> while one article is now unsourced.  [[General Semantics]], the messiest,
> most over-referenced article in the previous round of the survey, gained
> another three sources, for a total of 17.  Fortunately, it also gained a
> great deal of improvement.
>
> The image situation has changed significantly.  Originally, free images
> outnumbered non-free ones by 2:1, with only a few images of unknown
> copyright situation.  The ratio of free to non-free images hasn't changed,
> and the total number of images has gone up.  Of the six unsourced images in
> the original survey, all of them have been sourced or removed.  However,
> there are also 17 images with apparently-incorrect free-license tags: 16
> images from Commons with disputed PD-self tags, and a GFDL tag on an image
> that is probably not eligable for copyright.
>
> --
> Mark
> [[User:Carnildo]]
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