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
and Wikiproject:Science.
John
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 19:53:20 +0100
From: Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@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
