This problem plagued the Oxford English Dictionary (1st edition), only the most dedicated volunteers were willing to tackle the dull words like "put" "see" "art" "the" etc, words like "transmogrify" or "fandango" were much easier.
Fred
From: Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com Reply-To: Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com, wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100 To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus
Hmm, something that strikes me looking at those results is that on several categories Wikipedia seems to do worse on the "easy" topics but better on the "hard" ones. I don't know if I'm just imagining it, and it could just be a coincidence, but that seems like an interesting finding (were there any graphs in the article? one could probably construct a graph that demonstrated patterns like that).
Maybe the tendency to write about interesting subjects leads people to go in depth on subjects that they can become really fascinated by looking into, causing the more advanced topics to get better articles...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP] ________