>... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't > seem to care about the quality of the content....
There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality. I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally. Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The evidence is detailed at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space. Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently include the establishment of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of more than 150 bytes. At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years to meet the same goal. Another very impressive structural improvement involves User:Dispenser's enhancements to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog where most of the article backlog count numbers are now clickable, such that they will show a list of the backlog category's articles sorted by importance, measured by the number of incoming links. For example, http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/categorder.py?page=Category:All_unreferenced_BLPs As the number of incoming backlinks strongly correlates with the number of page views, this represents a quantum improvement for dealing with quality issue backlogs. There is no reason to believe that such organics and structural quality improvements will not continue. -Will _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l