I have cited Lih in some of my work.... but...
I find it problematic to use number of edits and number of authors
(quantitative date) as indicators of content quality. I'm willing to
believe that these are probably, in most cases, indicators of
improvement, but that's a huge assumption. To make this case, I think
some kind of qualitative analysis is necessary to demonstrate that the
article QUALITY improves by some set of standards and we'd expect that
these results will be correlated with number of authors/number of
edits. If anyone wants to collaborate on something like this, I might
have 15 or 20 minutes free in spring. ;-)
Andrea
(ELC Lab, GA Tech,
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc)
On 12/16/05, Jeremy Dunck <jdunck(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/15/05, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
What I would love to see is a study in a few
weeks/months to show the
evolution of these 50 articles in the days following the Nature
article... and the delay which was necessary to track the various errors.
Lih came close to this with his
"Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources?"
http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/utaustin-2004-wikipedia-rc2.pdf
He didn't compare factual improvement, but it's clear that media
attention improves specific articles.
As for referring to WP; I think it'd be useful if there were a
prominent link on article pages which gave the URL of the specific
revision currently viewed. Yes, you can get this from history, but
many argue that because WP is always changing (and not because it's
inaccurate), you mustn't cite it. Ignoring for the fact that the
whole web is fairly ephemeral at this point, citing a specific rev
addresses the changing-content issue.
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