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

Tue Dec 20 13:55:59 UTC 2011

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Tobias
<church.of.emacs.ml at googlemail.com>wrote:

> On 12/19/2011 11:38 PM, Yao Ziyuan 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.
>
> Hey Ziyuan,
>
> that's great! Have you made a statistical analysis whether the average
> revision that remained unchallanged by a long time is better than the
> average other revisions?
>

Honestly I haven't done a lot of tests, but I did investigated how
"ultra-stable Linux distributions" (Debian, RHEL/CentOS) select stable
software packages. I found Debian's model very similar to my idea: latest
software package versions are put in a pool called "unstable"; if a package
version remains in the "unstable" pool for a certain period of time with no
serious bugs discovered, it is automatically moved to the next pool,
"testing"; again, if a package version remains in the "testing" pool for a
certain period of time with no bugs discovered, it is automatically moved
to the next pool, "stable". Each new major release of Debian is a
collection of all packages in the "stable" pool. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Development_procedures)

So it seems this "trial by time" approach at least works for a big open
source software project like Debian.

> It would seem to me (as it seems to Tom), that often that's a false
> presumption, though that's probably based on guesses and anecdotal
> experience.
>
> Regards,
> Tobias
>
>
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