[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!

[Will Takatoshi]

>... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> seem to care about the quality of the content....

There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality.
I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests
of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to
improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally.

Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always
been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to
frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long
term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very
small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The
evidence is detailed at
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true
now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent
contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space.

Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently
include the establishment of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles
which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed
articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of
more than 150 bytes.  At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles
will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as
opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years
to meet the same goal.

Another very impressive structural improvement involves
User:Dispenser's enhancements to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog where most of
the article backlog count numbers are now clickable, such that they
will show a list of the backlog category's articles sorted by
importance, measured by the number of incoming links. For example,
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/categorder.py?page=Category:All_unreferenced_BLPs
As the number of incoming backlinks strongly correlates with the
number of page views, this represents a quantum improvement for
dealing with quality issue backlogs.

There is no reason to believe that such organics and structural
quality improvements will not continue.

-Will