[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus

Sat Oct 2 22:54:16 UTC 2004

This problem plagued the Oxford English Dictionary (1st edition), only the
most dedicated volunteers were willing to tackle the dull words like "put"
"see" "art" "the" etc, words like "transmogrify" or "fandango" were much
easier.

Fred

> From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>, wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100
> To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus
> 
> Hmm, something that strikes me looking at those results is that on
> several categories Wikipedia seems to do worse on the "easy" topics
> but better on the "hard" ones. I don't know if I'm just imagining it,
> and it could just be a coincidence, but that seems like an interesting
> finding (were there any graphs in the article? one could probably
> construct a graph that demonstrated patterns like that).
> 
> Maybe the tendency to write about interesting subjects leads people to
> go in depth on subjects that they can become really fascinated by
> looking into, causing the more advanced topics to get better
> articles...
> 
> -- 
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
> ________