[WikiEN-l] A quick references survey

Tue Jan 31 00:13:32 UTC 2006

On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I'd like to undertake a more thorough survey of wikipedia
> referencing standards, but I've started with a quick "pilot" study.
>
> Methodology: Click "random article". Discard results which are not
> articles. Count the number of "external links", "references",
> "paragraphs".
>
> Terms: A bit fuzzy, I'm treating a web page which gives more
> information as an "external link", and a page or book or whatever
> which is claimed to be the source of the information (or is clearly
> the source) as a "reference". Paragraphs are, well, paragraphs, but it
> must be said that longer articles generally have longer paragraphs
> than shorter ones do. So lines would probably be better...
>
> Preliminary results:
> Sample size:30 pages, of which 17 were stubs.
>
> Number with no links: 21
> Number with no references: 24
> Average number of links: 0.67
> Average number of references: 0.54
>
>
> I found very few book references, one of which was patently false
> ("James Maxwell's book of James Maxwells not as cool as me, by James
> Maxwell"). Similarly a list of newspaper articles turned out to all
> have been written by the subject (a journalist). One page (out of 30)
> actually gave ISBN references (Chepstow Bridge).

This compares reasonably well with the results of my survey
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100): about 15% of all
articles are sourced.  My methodology was a little different, as I
counted anything in a "references" section as a reference, while
inline links were collectively counted as one reference.

I'm still working on a survey of biography articles, but preliminary
results are that slightly fewer biographies are sourced, but ones that
are sourced tend to have more sources.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]