[Wikipedia-l] Measuring progress

[Axel Boldt]

> our progress has not stalled (right?)

If you measure progress based on article numbers, active contributors,
edits per day, software quality etc., it certainly hasn't. 

I would argue however that the most relevant measure is average
article quality. And Larry seems to think that on this front, we're
not doing too well:

> But, looking at Wikipedia's contents now and comparing it to what I
> recall from times past, I do have to say that I'm worried. I don't
> think that in terms of quality, overall, it's getting that much
> better.

While it is clear that pretty much every individual article improves
over time, it is still very possible that the average article quality
is stagnating, or even declining.

If I had an afternoon to burn, I'd hit the "Random link" button a
hundred times and would rate the articles on a scale of 0 - 10. Then I
would rate 100 article versions from three months ago (skip if the
article didn't exist then). Then compare the averages. Ideally, this
would be done in a "blind" manner, so that I didn't know whether an
article version is current or old.

Axel