> The vast majority of Wikipedia articles are low-to-mid > quality, with most being also quite short; but this is simply > because there are so very many of them. Despite the wiki > technology, most of these articles only have one or two > primary authors, as well. Most of this "long tail" of short > articles are not comparable to Britannica or other > encyclopedias, simply because Britannica does not include > topics such as every episode of popular TV shows as > "articles".
I agree. That's why when we talk about the quality of WP versus traditional sources, it's important to focus on content that is covered by both types of resources. The fact that Wikipedia covers content that is not covered by Brittanica should not be held against the approach. It should be considered a strength, not a weakness! > You also, of course, have to come up with a > good definition of "quality" -- obviously, Wikipedia meets > some definitions, but completely fails others (like written > by experts in the field). "Written by experts in the field" is a process-oriented definition of quality. Such definitions are always highly suspicious. They're often promoted by tool and process vendors who want to equate quality with their particular brand of tool or process. It's much better to define quality of a product in terms of attributes of the end product than in terms of the process by which it was achieved. Rereading the Nature article, I noticed that they talk about two dimensions of quality: - Accuracy of the information - Clarity of presentation While WP seems to do very well on accuracy, it seems many of the expert reviewers in the study complained about Clarity. So maybe the claim should be that: "Experience shows that wikis *can* lead to *comprehensive and accurate* content" > In part because of this, and because of other factors, the > English Wikipedia is not, perhaps, the best wiki to look at > when trying to make a statement about wiki technology in > general. EN:WP has a highly developed ruleset, culture, > practices and visibility that can't necessary be carried over > to talking about other wikis, such as those with a smaller or > restricted community. For communities, are you talking about > wikis that foster communities that already exist (such as > within a company) or wikis that *create* community by > existing (like Wikipedia?) The latter seems true enough by > example; I'm not sure about the former. I'm making the claim in the context of this article: http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:AD1 Which talks about creating a world-wide community of translators. > > By the way, the 1.0 project that Brian pointed to was rating > by topic (trying to find good articles, not poor ones) and > trying to find core articles that could be included in a CD > version of WP. They worked with the WikiProjects and on their > own to come up with lists within subjects. They've also been > working on a "core topics" list: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_T > eam/Core_topics > (and a variation) > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_topics_-_1%2C000 > > Considering that the Nature study actually relied on a very > similar methodology -- asking experts to subjectively rate > articles -- it seems like a pretty valid comparison. The > reviewers working on 1.0 are academics and experienced > Wikipedians; the people working in the WikiProjects > presumably have some subject knowledge. OK, thx for the precisions. One way that this differs from the Nature study is that it does not compare WP's quality on those articles to the quality level on Brittanica. What is your impression on that? Would the low quality articles on that list fail the test of being comparable to Brittanica in terms of accuracy? > (I think Brian and I are proving the point here that if you > want detailed criticism of Wikipedia, ask some long-time > contributors :) ) Such self-criticism is a sure sign of a healthy community! ---- Alain Désilets, National Research Council of Canada Chair, WikiSym 2007 2007 International Symposium on Wikis Wikis at Work in the World: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century http://www.wikisym.org/ws2007/ _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
