[WikiEN-l] Article rating topics - speak now!

Fri May 27 16:56:07 UTC 2005

On Thursday 26 May 2005 08:41, David Gerard wrote:
> I particularly want to hear from academic researchers interested in
> Wikipedia - you folk will LOVE this data. What things would you
> particularly like to see reader/editor ratings of?

At first blush, it would make sense to rate articles with respect to the 
criteria of what makes a good article as documented on:
  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_a_featured_article
  [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles

So it would be nice if the ratings captured whether it was well written, an 
appropriate reading level, an appropriate size, NPOV, the appropriate use 
of references, etc. However, that said, I don't think it should include 
anything that could be done by machine. (Lih's (2004) quality (rigor, 
diversity), Newberry's (2004) mass and luminosity, and Emigh's & Herring's 
(2005) formality don't seem to apply in this case of users' subjective 
ratings.) So for example, that would remove the reading level and 
appropriate size which could be generated automatically. Also, it should be 
kept relatively simple. A single subjective rating informed by [1,2] might 
be good enough.

On second thought, the question is very relevant to some of my experiences 
at the W3C. Since we advocated valid HTML, it was embarrassing that some of 
our pages were not valid HTML. So after time we began generating reports of 
the most popular invalid pages, and who owned them. This enabled us to 
drastically reduce the likelihood of the public encountering an invalid W3C 
page. So, it would be really interesting to see what are the most popular 
stub articles. (This to could be generated automatically from referrer, but 
can also be used so as to find the most popular poorly rated articles once 
we have that data.)