On 8/29/07, Brian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am thinking more along the lines of the loss of quality of previously high > quality articles, which are already incredibly small in proportion, such as > "featured articles." Traditional content production methods asymptote in > quality, but the editing process in place at Wikipedia (which is only one > possible wiki process, and also one of the most successful, but does not > necessarily speak about wikis in general) encourages articles to gradually > increase in quality, and then again decrease. It is unknown if they will > stabilize (which brings about thoughts of a 1.0) > > There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Former_featured_articles > > This could be due to changing featured article criteria, but in general, the > claim that simply starting a wiki encourages high quality content is lacking > evidence. If anything, wikis encourage the addition of noise to high quality > content. Adding noise to turing complete wiki syntax can quickly snowball, > turning into an aggregation of media that lacks coherence.
I think that monitoring featured articles is a poor metric for quality of Wikipedia articles in general, as getting an article "featured" on English Wikipedia is not solely a function of article quality -- some poor work gets through and some good work will never get through (because the subject doesn't merit a long article, for example), or in some cases those writing articles have no desire to put them through the featured article process. The ratings by the individual wikiprojects, while still wildly variable and idiosyncratic, are probably a better guide. -Kat -- Wikimedia needs you: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mindspillage | (G)AIM:Mindspillage mindspillage or mind|wandering on irc.freenode.net | email for phone _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
