I must say I'm pretty dubious about this approach for articles. I doubt
it can detect most of the typical problems with them - for example
all-online sources are
very often a warning sign, but may not be, or may be inevitable in a
topical subject. Most of Charles' factors below relate better to views
and controversialness than article quality, and
article quality has a limited ability to increase views, as study of FAs
before and after expansion will show.
Personally I'd think the lack of 1 to say 4 dominant editors in the
stats is a more reliable warning sign than "A single editor, or
essentially only one editor with
tweaking" in most subjects. Nothing is more characteristic of a popular
but poor article than a huge list of contributors, all with fewer than
10 edits. Sadly, the implied notion (at T for Traffic below) that
fairly high views automatically lead to increased quality is very
dubious - we have plenty of extremely bad articles that have had by now
millions of viewers who have between them done next to nothing to
improve the now-ancient text.
There is also the question of what use the results of the exercise will
be. Our current quality ratings certainly have problems, but are a lot
better than nothing. However the areas where systematic work seems to
be going on improving the lowest rated articles, in combination with
high importance ratings, are relatively few. An automated system is
hard to argue with, & I'm concerned that such ratings will actually
cause more problems than they reveal or solve, if people take them more
seriously than they deserve, or are unable to over-ride or question
them. One issue with the manual system is that it tends to give a
greatly excessive
weight to article length, as though there was a standard ideal size for
all subjects, which of course there isn't. It will be even harder for
an automated system to avoid the same pitfall without relying on the
very blunt instrument of our importance ratings, which don't pretend to
operate to common standards, so that nobody thinks that
"high-importance" means, or should mean, the same between say
WikiProject_Friesland
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_Friesland> and
Wikiproject:Science.
John
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 19:53:20 +0100
From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>
There's the old DREWS acronym from How Wikipedia Works. to which I'd now
add T for traffic. In other words there are six factors that an experienced
human would use to analyse quality, looking in particular for warning signs.
D = Discussion: crunch the talk page (20 archives = controversial, while no
comments indicates possible neglect)
R = WikiProject rating, FWIW, if there is one.
E = Edit history. A single editor, or essentially only one editor with
tweaking, is a warning sign. (Though not if it is me, obviously)
W = Writing. This would take some sort of text analysis. Work to do here.
Includes detection of non-standard format, which would suggest neglect by
experienced editors.
S = Sources. Count footnotes and so on.
T = Traffic. Pages at 100 hits per month are not getting many eyeballs.
Warning sign. Very high traffic is another issue.
Seems to me that there is enough to bite on, here.
Charles
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