On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 22:38, Yao Ziyuan <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > > Of course there can be additional factors to refine this, such as also > considering each revision's author's reputation (Wikipedia has a reputation > system for Wikipedians), but I still feel the above idea is the simplest > and most elegant, just like the original PageRank idea is for Google. >
Okay, how about this. I find a page today that has had only one edit in the past year. That edit was an IP editor changing the page to insert the image of a man sticking his genitalia into a bowl of warm pasta (I haven't checked Wikimedia Commons but would not be surprised...). Nobody notices the change until I come along and undo it. I then see that it is a topic that interests both myself and a friend of mine, and we collaborate on improving the article together: he writes the prose and I dig out obscure references from academic databases. Between us, we edit the page four or five times a day, every day for a week improving the article until it reaches GA status. Having nominated it for GA, a WikiProject picks up on the importance of the topic and a whole swarm of editors interested in the topic swoop in and keep editing it collaboratively for months on end. Under your metric, in this scenario, the edits of a sysop and an experienced user, or later the WikiProject editors, would not be chosen as the high-quality stable version. As for author reputation, check out the WikiTrust extension for Firefox - see http://www.wikitrust.net/ -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
