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.)