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(a)gmail.com>
Reply-To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com>om>, wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100
To: wikipedia-l(a)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]
________