[WikiEN-l] Article surveys again

Mon Sep 18 23:39:04 UTC 2006

Back in mid-November, I did a survey of 100 randomly-selected
articles, and re-checked them in February and May:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100.  At the end of
August, I finished the fourth check of those articles.  The seven
deleted articles are still deleted, and the three redirects are still
redirects.

Over the past three months, 997 edits were made to articles on the
list, giving a mean of 10.72 edits per article.  This rate is about in
line with the past two checks: slightly higher than the February-May
rate, and slightly lower than November-February rate.

More articles were edited in the May-August period than the
February-May period, with only 13 articles un-edited during that
period, and no article unchanged since November.  This seems to
reflect an increase in automated and semi-automated editing, though,
as many of the edits were done by bots or AutoWikiBrowser.

More articles are being heavily edited, with 22 in the 10+ edits range
for 79% of all edits.  Five articles were edited 50 or more times,
with [[Midfielder]] (147 edits) taking the title of "most edited" from
[[Lawrenceville School]] (69 edits).  Large numbers of edits does not
always equate to quality: the second-most-edited article, [[List of
Barney & Friends stage shows]], was deleted via AfD.  On the other
hand, [[Midfielder]] and [[Canadian Forces Air Command]] showed
significant improvement during this time period.

Overall quality is almost entirely unchanged: two stubs were moved to
higher categories, with [[Criterion Theatre]] going to "good", while
[[Angus (Scottish Parliament constituency)]] went to "low".  Most
other articles gained a sentence or less.

One article lost a great deal of ground in terms of quality:
[[Internet Haganah]] had sources removed and a highly-POV,
potentially-libelous criticism section was added.  Since I did the
August check, someone's liberally added {{unreferenced}} and {{fact}}
tags to the section, but no other changes have been made.

Sourcing of articles declined slightly: one article gained sourcing,
while another had all sources removed, for a net loss of one source.
On the positive side, two articles gained inline references.  The
number of references cited for [[General Semantics]] is unchanged, at
27.

The image situation continues to improve, but slowly.  The ratio of
free to non-free images improved to 2.4:1, with the addition of eight
free images and two non-free images, and the removal of three
incorrectly-tagged free images and one non-free images.  The number of
problem images has also risen, with the addition of two "by
permission" images, one unsourced image, and one image with a dubious
PD claim.

The number of warning tags on articles has increased to six, with the
addition of {{cite}}, {{expandsection}}, {{disambig-cleanup}}, and
{{unreferenced-section}} tags.  The two {{unreferenced}} tags from the
previous check are still there.

-- 
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]