Statistical measure of quality in Wikipedia. - 49 views
started by FARNAZ SHAMS on 15 Mar 12
started by FARNAZ SHAMS on 15 Mar 12
Start a New Topic » « Back to the Net 308/508 Internet Collaboration and Organisation S1 2012 group
Wikipedia has become one of the most popular crowdsourcing and co-authorship networks, which is being written by millions of volunteers all around the world. However, the quality of Wikipedia's articles is debatable. For example, in 2005 John Seigenthaler (a journalist) found incorrect biographic information about himself in Wikipedia, he found he affirmed he saw the U.S president John F. Kennedys assassination and because Wikipedia does not accept any responsibility about its validity of information, he thought Wikipedia's content cannot be trustable. So, Wikipedia increased its users to have more "featured article" (articles which have marked as "featured article" have the highest validity). When an article marked as featured, more users come to see and edit them, statistic shows 95% of edited articles are them marked as statistic.
There is a positive relation between the quality and the number of revision and editing of an article. Because, when an article edited many times, the article will be more qualified than its first edition. However, focusing on contributor's reputation to estimate quality of content has some limitations:
Data sparsely: large numbers of users in Wikipedia do not have essential information to edit content, so new user's content presumed as invaluable edits.
Anonymity: recognizing the active editors and publishers of Wikipedia is hard to understand, however, sometimes the most active of them can recognize by their IP address.
Expertise: "the quality of a user's contribution depends on his expertise on that particular topic", because some editors may be very professional editor about a specific topic and they can't have valuable information about all topics in Wikipedia or there is no guarantee that the most active editors be active in future. In addition, Wikipedia has very valid articles and if a new user changes its content, the system automatically refreshes content to its last edit.