Sheldon Rampton wrote:
But that wasn't the question. The article asked if
Wikipedia had
tested its reliability by taking a number of RANDOMLY-SELECTED
articles and submitting them to scholars for fact-checking, to which
Jimbo admitted that they hadn't.
Just out of curiosity, I clicked the "Random page" link a few times.
Out of ten articles, I found five stubs, two of which had frequent
grammatical errors. The remaining five included one article that
seemed strongly opinionated about the [[Nintendo Seal of Quality]],
and four articles of varying length that appear from what I can tell
to be accurate and appropriate for their topics. (Of course, I'm not
really qualified to judge the accuracy of some of the articles which
discuss topics outside my areas of interest.)
My little experiment isn't sufficient to serve as the basis for any
conclusions, but if two out of ten articles are grammatically-flawed
stubs, it would seem to support the article's contention that
Wikipedia doesn't yet meet the quality-control standards of a
commercial encyclopedia like Encyclopedia Britannica.
This kind of sampling technique is certainly valid as a measure of
quality, though I think that the sample size may be too small. If we
take a sample of 25 articles and rate them on a zero to four scale (for
a maximum score of 100) it will give us some idea of quality levels.
The first time that it is done it will give us base-line data. Doing it
again after three months or a year will let us know if we have made any
progress. To improve objectivity the testing should be done by several
people, and their scores averaged.
One possible general scale:
0. A stub or little more than a stub.
1. A short incomplete article; this may indicate that it should be
merged with something else. A stable POV article that everyone has ignored.
2. An average article. It may be POV, but it has a lot of
activity, or even in the middle of an edit war. The current POV phase
is not relevant since that is likely to change within the next five
minutes. The writing style may be awkward.
3. A good quality article may still have some uncertain material,
or faulty grammar but these can probably be fixed with ease.
4. A superior article that provides a comprehensive and neutral
approach to the subject. The reading of the text flows with ease, and
there are very few minor spelling errors or typos.
Of course similar scales could be established that focus solely on such
things as factual accuracy, grammar, etc.
Another technique might be to sent randomly selected articles to
sympathetic professors who do not for themselves write for Wikipedia,
and ask them to rate the articles as they would term papers. It does
not matter if the sample includes articles outside of that professor's
field since an encyclopedia might be a place that they would look if
they were trying to inform themselves about it.
Ec