[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Sat Sep 18 00:04:21 UTC 2010

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Yann Forget <yannfo at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree that the core content of Wikipedia should be educational, not trivia.

Well, here's our core content (5 thousand or so out of 3.x million):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded

As it happens I've been proofreading articles of late; under nobody's
say-so I've decided to work my through The Time 100:

http://205.188.238.181/time/time100/leaders/

I'm only through the first 12. I have to say, I've been delighted by
what I've seen. 12 out of 3.x million isn't a much better sample than
the two or three this thread has so far been offered. So all we can
say at this point is that "one user thinks that nothing is better
since 2005" whilst "another user thinks that what we have in 2010 is
delightful".

Which brings us back the question: what is the quality of our content?

Well this list of the 1,000 most important articles as judged by
[waves hand, but I think we'll grant that they think [[Biology]] more
important than [[Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo]] ] doesn't give any
figures but does show the quality rating for each article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_topics_-_1,000

Scanning with my eyes I see a lot of green, where green = B.

So there is your answer, probably. Wikipedia's grade is B.

What does B mean? Here we are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B-criteria

Hey, that sounds pretty good!

So: In 2010 we can say "Wikipedia is pretty good".

Unfortunately this still leaves the question: was Wikipedia pretty good in 2005?

I find I feel absolutely no compulsion to attempt to answer this. But
since it is a question of importance to Peter Damian he will of course
present data of comparable complexity to mine after the weekend.

Deciding whether to give money to an educational charity that "has
made 1,000 educational topics available for free which are pretty
good" is a matter for one's own heart.

> Of course, the quality of most articles has improved, but I would like
> to see some serious study about this unbalance [between triv and educational content], and what WMF
> intends to do to correct this.

Correction implies wrongness. There will always be more television
programmes, long playing records, popular beat combos and innovative
sex toys than there will be Einsteins, paradigm shifting scientific
discoveries and philosophical enquiries. These are the degraded times
in which we live. I suspect the popularity of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales in his day was rightly castigated for being nothing more than a
tawdry narrative of Miller's arses. Society really started to go
downhill in the 14th century and absolutely nothing has improved since
then.

But since we must live with the triv/education imbalance that Chaucer
burdened us with, we can at least pray that the twelve year old who
religiously edits [[Numb3rs]] (sic) now might be editing
[[mathematical modelling]] in a decade's time; after all the second is
wikilinked in the first. It's surely not too much to ask that someone
clicks his mouse once each either side of puberty?

But I agree with Yann... we should remove our article on [[Crazy
Frog]]. Isn't it horrifying to think how broad our coverage is? I
can't tell you how angry I feel when someone tells me they know of
Wikipedia. I'm glad at first, of course, but when they tell me they
were searching Google for [[Hanson (band)]] and we were one of the top
ten hits, I am repulsed. I am forced to think "Bleurgh! We don't want
*that* *sort* *of* *person* here!"

And, no, I am not mollified when they say "I found out that one member
had a [[pulmonary embolism]], I didn't know what that was, so I
clicked. And there someone had spelt 'heart' as 'haert' so I changed
it and from that point I got excited about Wikipedia."

This sort of story I find eminently vomit-inducing and I generally
stalk their contributions waiting for them to do something else
objectionable so that I can get the mods to ban them. Unfortunately he
hasn't done anything that falls outside the guidelines yet, these last
five years, but he will one day and I'll be there.

I estimate that about 70% of our content should be jettisoned. That
70% of material does absolutely nothing but pique people's prurient
interest in Wikipedia, it brings undesirable people on board that then
have the temerity to add sourced contributions to core articles, and I
suspect these people then go off and tell other people about
Wikipedia. I mean, who needs it?

User:Bodnotbod