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

Tue Dec 20 13:07:38 UTC 2011

>
> ------------------------------
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Yao Ziyuan <yaoziyuan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Wikipedians,
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Ziyuan Yao
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:16:15 +0000
> From: Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] "RevisionRank": automatically finding out
>        high-quality revisions of an article
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAAQB2S9TEQhuiaD4Gb0ZjV-tVSLRgmmjHjbHJwAww=8UiFtf3A at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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/>
>
>
>
>
Hi Ziyuan Yao, that is an interesting idea, but not necessarily something
that one should do automatically.

I recently found an article that since 2006 had been telling the world
where the Holy Grail had been from the closure of Glastonbury monastery
until the start of the twentieth century. It will take some years of
non-editing for the new version of that article to become the stable one.

Also some of the articles that our readers are most interested in would
look a tad dated. Sarah Palin's article may no longer be at the 25 edits
per minute stage that it peaked at, but how many years will it be before it
becomes as stable as it was a week before she became John McCain's running
mate?

Of course the edit history is out there so the earlier versions are
available under the same license as the current version. So any
enterprising mirror could adopt a system like this if they thought it would
look at least as good as the current Wikipedia. As far as I know no-one has
yet, and I suspect if they did they'd have legal problems re libellous
statements about living people. Wikipedia at least has the moral and I hope
legal defence that when we learn of an error we fix it. This sort of system
would be automatically displaying an earlier version despite knowing that
in many cases it would be displaying false and damaging information.

WSC

WSC