[Foundation-l] "RevisionRank": automatically finding out high-quality revisions of an article

Tue Dec 20 01:16:15 UTC 2011

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 22:38, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I seem to have found a way to automatically judge which revision of a
> Wikipedia article has the best quality.
>
> It's very simple: look at that article's edit history and find out, within
> a specified time range (e.g. the past 6 months), which revision remained
> unchallenged for the longest time until the next revision occurred.
>
> Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also
> considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a reputation
> system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest
> and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google.
>

Okay, how about this.

I find a page today that has had only one edit in the past year. That
edit was an IP editor changing the page to insert the image of a man
sticking his genitalia into a bowl of warm pasta (I haven't checked
Wikimedia Commons but would not be surprised...).

Nobody notices the change until I come along and undo it. I then see
that it is a topic that interests both myself and a friend of mine,
and we collaborate on improving the article together: he writes the
prose and I dig out obscure references from academic databases.
Between us, we edit the page four or five times a day, every day for a
week improving the article until it reaches GA status. Having
nominated it for GA, a WikiProject picks up on the importance of the
topic and a whole swarm of editors interested in the topic swoop in
and keep editing it collaboratively for months on end.

Under your metric, in this scenario, the edits of a sysop and an
experienced user, or later the WikiProject editors, would not be
chosen as the high-quality stable version.

As for author reputation, check out the WikiTrust extension for
Firefox - see http://www.wikitrust.net/

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>