A scientific analysis of wikipedia's articles

Wikipedia isn't bad on technical subjects. It's quite a useful quick reference for that.

There's a useful rule of thumb to find errors in Wikipedia: Anything touching on politics will be wrong.
 
A more sober analysis would be: that which is factual cannot be viewed as reliable, that which is mathematical might be correct, that which is controversial is mediocre and occasionally unreadable, that which is boring and uncontroversial is probably untouched by idiots and of high quality until they make it the "featured article of the day" in which case it is the focus of massive vandalism attacks, reverts and edit wars for several months until the original authors give up, the moderators revert things occasionally for swear words and the article is used as the main source by an average student who is given an F.

Meanwhile there is nothing wrong with Wikipedia which is why:
Wales also plans to introduce a 'stable' version of each entry. Once an article reaches a specific quality threshold it will be tagged as stable. Further edits will be made to a separate 'live' version that would replace the stable version when deemed to be a significant improvement. One method for determining that threshold, where users rate article quality, will be trialled early next year.
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But this isn't institutional creep or the first stage of instituting an academic review process or elitism, but the dawn of a new era of open-source article generation which is free as in beer.
 
geni said:
Yes. However past experence with outher sites that use rateings is that results can be quite good.
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The millions of monkeys can now vote on the best gibberish.

I'm going to start a thread on my conversations with Robert McHenry
 
Diamond said:
A more sober analysis would be: that which is factual cannot be viewed as reliable, that which is mathematical might be correct, that which is controversial is mediocre and occasionally unreadable,
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Nah. Schizophrenic maybe.


that which is boring and uncontroversial is probably untouched by idiots and of high quality until they make it the "featured article of the day" in which case it is the focus of massive vandalism attacks, reverts and edit wars for several months
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Nah in most cases people leave them alone once they are off the front page. I watchlisted quite a few featured articles so I know what thier vandalism rate.

For example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_Civil_War

Has barely ben touched since it left the front page
until the original authors give up, the moderators revert things occasionally for swear words
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We don't have moderatots

and the article is used as the main source by an average student who is given an F.
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Judging by the ffedback we get this is not the case.
Meanwhile there is nothing wrong with Wikipedia which is why:


But this isn't institutional creep or the first stage of instituting an academic review process or elitism, but the dawn of a new era of open-source article generation which is free as in beer.
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You appear to be makeing the mistake of beliveing a newspaper about what what jimbo is saying. Past expoerence suggests that is not good idea.
 
geni said:
You appear to be makeing the mistake of beliveing a newspaper about what what jimbo is saying. Past expoerence suggests that is not good idea.
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Well he could have written his statements directly on Wikipedia, but then would have anyone believed it?
 
Diamond said:
Well he could have written his statements directly on Wikipedia, but then would have anyone believed it?
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Lets just say that past history of jimbo being quoted by the press is not great in terms of accuracy.
 
geni said:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html

Britanica beats us 3:4 in terms of errors.

So second but not too bad. Just don't mention Mendeleev, Dmitry.
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Of course, this leaves out some important info from the article, that makes this finding a bit less impressive than it look at first. To wit:

compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science
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Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries.
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Emphasis added.
Several Nature reviewers agreed with Panelas' point on readability, commenting that the Wikipedia article they reviewed was poorly structured and confusing. This criticism is common among information scientists, who also point to other problems with article quality, such as undue prominence given to controversial scientific theories.
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Interesting that they focussed exclusively on scientific articles. It's long been admitted by all but the most hardcore Wikipedia critics that scientific articles are it's strongest point, and the one area where it is potentially able to equal more traditional sources. Sciences are fairly straightforward, with little room for opinionating, aside from sheer woo-woo pseudoscience, which is easily recognized and eliminated.

There was no review done of the less rigid disciplines, such as history, art, socio-economics, etc. I'd be willing to bet that, in comparison to Britannica or other traditional sources, Wikipedia fares considerably less well outside a strictly scientific arena.
 
luchog said:
I'd be willing to bet that, in comparison to Britannica or other traditional sources, Wikipedia fares considerably less well outside a strictly scientific arena.
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How much?
 
Diamond said:
Wales also plans to introduce a 'stable' version of each entry. Once an article reaches a specific quality threshold it will be tagged as stable. Further edits will be made to a separate 'live' version that would replace the stable version when deemed to be a significant improvement. One method for determining that threshold, where users rate article quality, will be trialled early next year.
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Is "trialled" a word now?
 
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