[Foundation-l] Tragical dynamics: that run for the number of articles

Sat Jun 28 21:47:30 UTC 2008

2008/6/28 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>:
> I have discussed my study with many people (one had similar results),
> but no one was so aggressive, Tomasz.
>
>> b)your own subconcious attitude toward various nations and Wikipedias
>
> ? Is this an accusation?
>

No, I am just a scientist, so I have a tendency to be sceptical and
have basic knowledge about typical mistakes of doing statistical
research.Too small sample, no clear criteria of evaluating it, and you
did not tested the experimental error or replication of your method,
by comparing results from several experiments asking other people to
use your meaning of what "real" article is.

50 articles sample tested by one person, who for sure have its own
attitudes is not enough to say that this or another Wikipedia is
better or worse. Everyone has its own attitudes towards one or another
nation. It is very natural thing. And if there is no clear definition
of what is "real" article and what is not, and to evaluate this it was
used google machine translation (which according to NIST survey from
2006 is found to be OK in only around 49% cases) so I am quite sure
that your results cannot be taken seriously. You could have stastical
error at least around 15-20% (if not more), so the results 0,60 or
0,80 is in experimental error range.

Anyway it would be interesting to make better planned experiments to
evaluate the quality of Wikipedia articles, but for sure it has to be
done on larger sample, some sort of "hard" criteria or a group of at
least 10 researchers speaking diffrent languages and having different
cultural background when to use "soft, human based" criteria.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html