Many projects have installed a “popular pages” tool highlighting which of the 
pages with the talk page banner are most popular. It is updated monthly (ish) 
see for example 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Somerset/Popular_pages  so 
the toolserver tool at https://toolserver.org/~alexz/pop/ may also be useful.

 

On a more general point can I just ask why an automated tool (using all the 
suggested parameters) is likely to be any more accurate that the human 
generated wikiproject rankings?

 

Rod

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Edward Saperia
Sent: 17 April 2014 14:48
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Rating Wikimedia content (was Our next, strategy 
plan-Paid editing)

 

It's interesting to think that in most circumstances, good online content is 
considered to drive traffic, i.e. quality pages attract more views, but with 
Wikipedia articles, I've only ever seen people think high traffic articles => 
more editors => higher quality. This is intuitive, but it would be interesting 
to see how true it is. It would also be interesting to see what percentage of 
readers are editors by topic area; I suspect this would vary a lot.

 

I always find it a bit of a shame that viewership figures are hidden away in an 
unpublicised tool (https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikiviewstats/). I would have 
though seeing how many people view a page would be very motivating to editors, 
and perhaps could be displayed prominently e.g. on talk pages.




Edward Saperia

Chief Coordinator Wikimania London <http://www.wikimanialondon.org> 

email <mailto:[email protected]>  • facebook 
<http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia>  • twitter 
<http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia>  • 07796955572

133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG

 

On 17 April 2014 14:34, Simon Knight <[email protected]> wrote:

I think we’d want to distinguish between:

·         Quality – taken from diff-features (i.e. Writing, but possibly 
including Sources), and 

·         Significance – taken from Traffic, Edit History, and Discussion

 

The latter might be used to give a weighting to the high-significance ratings 
such that high quality edits on highly significant articles are rated higher, 
but that’s a secondary question.

 

You’re right that then there’s an interesting issue re: what’s output, and how 
this is used. In this case our primary interest is in getting a feel for what 
level of quality the quantity of WMUK related edits are. One can easily imagine 
that being used by other chapters/orgs within the movement, but it could of 
course also be spread outside of article writing (e.g. any education assignment 
on a wiki) or/and be used by projects to explore article qualities. I would 
guess that outputting discrete scores for various things (e.g. ‘referencing’, 
‘organisation’, etc.) and providing some means to amalgamate those scores for 
an overview would be more useful than just a raw ‘score’/rating. I’ll think 
about this a bit more over the weekend I hope.

 

Cheers

S

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Byrne
Sent: 17 April 2014 13:46
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Rating Wikimedia content (was Our next, strategy 
plan-Paid editing)

 

I must say I'm pretty dubious about this approach for articles.  I doubt it can 
detect most of the typical problems with them - for example all-online sources 
are 
very often a warning sign, but may not be, or may be inevitable in a topical 
subject.  Most of Charles' factors below relate better to views and 
controversialness than article quality, and 
article quality has a limited ability to increase views, as study of FAs before 
and after expansion will show. 

Personally I'd think the lack of 1 to say 4 dominant editors in the stats is a 
more reliable warning sign than "A single editor, or essentially only one 
editor with
tweaking" in most subjects.  Nothing is more characteristic of a popular but 
poor article than a huge list of contributors, all with fewer than 10 edits.  
Sadly, the implied notion (at T for Traffic below) that fairly high views 
automatically lead to increased quality is very dubious - we have plenty of 
extremely bad  articles that have had by now millions of viewers who have 
between them done next to nothing to improve the now-ancient text. 

There is also the question of what use the results of the exercise will be.  
Our current quality ratings certainly have problems, but are a lot better than 
nothing.  However the areas where systematic work seems to be going on 
improving the lowest rated articles, in combination with high importance 
ratings,  are relatively few.   An automated system is hard to argue with, & 
I'm concerned that such ratings will actually 
cause more problems than they reveal or solve, if people take them more 
seriously than they deserve, or are unable to over-ride or question them.   One 
issue with the manual system is that it tends to give a greatly excessive 
weight to article length, as though there was a standard ideal size for all 
subjects, which of course there isn't.   It will be even harder for an 
automated system to avoid the same pitfall without relying on the very blunt 
instrument of our importance ratings, which don't pretend to operate to common 
standards, so that nobody thinks that "high-importance" means, or should mean, 
the same between say WikiProject_Friesland 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_Friesland>  and Wikiproject:Science. 
  

John

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 19:53:20 +0100
From: Charles Matthews  <mailto:[email protected]> 
<[email protected]>
 
 
There's the old DREWS acronym from How Wikipedia Works. to which I'd now
add T for traffic. In other words there are six factors that an experienced
human would use to analyse quality, looking in particular for warning signs.
 
D = Discussion: crunch the talk page (20 archives = controversial, while no
comments indicates possible neglect)
R = WikiProject rating, FWIW, if there is one.
E = Edit history. A single editor, or essentially only one editor with
tweaking, is a warning sign. (Though not if it is me, obviously)
W = Writing. This would take some sort of text analysis. Work to do here.
Includes detection of non-standard format, which would suggest neglect by
experienced editors.
S = Sources. Count footnotes and so on.
T = Traffic. Pages at 100 hits per month are not getting many eyeballs.
Warning sign. Very high traffic is another issue.
 
Seems to me that there is enough to bite on, here.
 
Charles
 
 
 

 

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