On 17 April 2014 13:46, John Byrne <john@bodkinprints.co.uk> wrote:

<snip> 
 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.

I was of course giving the most brief and telegraphic indications, just so as to unpick the acronym. A much fuller discussion is in Chapter 4 of How Wikipedia Works, so I hardly need go into all those things here and now. 

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. 

Depends what you are talking about. The point here, and similarly in other places, though, is that it might be good or it might be bad to have a single editor. "More research required", as usual, but you are then researching something definite, and this is what we all do: check out a user page. A machine could at least make a rough guess, and work has been done on reputation systems.

The "single-purpose account" is a warning flag, and such editing tends to go with article creation about fringe things where others may hardly bother. As I hinted, there can be false positives with single editors, but it is a useful attack on the issue, surely.

The multiple editor phenomenon you are talking about is indeed characteristic of mediocre articles. We have to recall that "good" articles make up less than 1% of Wikipedia's articles. 
 
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.

No, my point was as before, really. Very low traffic and very high traffic tell you something. Mid-range traffic doesn't sort the sheep from the goats. 


There is also the question of what use the results of the exercise will be.  

Oh, I agree. But the current "system" does seem skewed towards recognition of better content, rather than dealing purposefully with the worst 10%. Picking up the latter in some mechanical way is always worth considering.

Charles