This month's issue of the research journal First Monday contains an article entitled Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature articles by David Lindsey (a student at Georgetown University and one of the two authors of the OnWikipedia blog mentioned previously in the Signpost). Based on the assessments of 22 featured articles by subject experts, the author concluded: "In expert evaluations, nearly one–third of the featured articles assessed were found to fail Wikipedia’s own featured article criteria."
In a discussion about the paper Shimgray analyzed the score that articles received in the evaluation versus the time that had passed since their FA promotion, and speculated that the low scores might be due to a decay in quality in "unmaintained" articles (rather than problems in the review process). Lindsey replied that drawing solid conclusions about this from the study was "absolutely impossible" because of the small sample size.
In a 19 April blog posting, social networking site Facebook announced the launch of what it calls "Community Pages":
The example depicted in the announcement shows the lede of Wikipedia's cooking article. On each Community Page, a "Wikipedia" tab links to the full text of the Wikipedia article (if it exists).
On the Foundation-l mailing list, the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Business Development, Kul Wadhwa, announced the development to Wikipedians, adding:
Replying to concerns that Facebook would draw potential editors away from Wikipedia, Wadhwa said that "we did give this a lot of thought. Facebook wanted to do this anyway (and they could take the content as long as they follow the license(s)) but we thought that, in the end, it would be better if we work with them on this to influence them to do it in a positive [way]."
Facebook has already initiated over 6.5 million of these pages, according to TechCrunch, which observed that the new feature seems to be Facebook's reaction to the problem that the "Pages" feature, introduced last year for brands and celebrities to present information about themselves, was increasingly used by Facebook members to create unofficial pages, also about other topics like baseball or yoga. TechCrunch also noted that adding content to Community Pages is not yet possible.
To CNET ("Facebookipedia?"), Facebook appears to be "actively treading into a territory that few companies have explored other than Wikipedia and Google", in "one of the boldest steps that the social-networking site has taken toward, well, consuming your life".
In a blog post for the San Francisco Chronicle, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and a member of the Wikimedia advisory board, says he will be spending some time addressing complaints about biographies of living people. He writes:
I've volunteered to help out with short term problems, as part of my normal daily customer service work. (That is, it's part of what I feel is my personal public service mission. This is on my own initiative, not strictly as part of my role on the advisory board.) If you see a bio that's been attacked, please let me know, and normally I'll find a way to get it fixed, have already done so in the case of a sitting US Senator.
Discuss this story
I think that Lindsey article is interesting, but has some major shortcomings. The biggest thing that stood out to me is the reliance on only one expert per article, meaning that each data point could be just as much a reflection of the reviewer's own standards and personal tastes. Amongst some academics, there is a tendency to rip any written work to shreds, just to show that you can do it. Other academics might be inclined to rate an article highly just because they are jazzed that someone else cares about the subject. This study has no way of controlling for reviewer bias.
I still think this study is useful, and given the nature of it, its a bit much to expect much more. Still, I think drawing sweeping conclusions from such a limited study is a mistake. Bonewah (talk) 18:13, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]