Why Do Wikipedia Articles Vary So Much in Quality?

Hugh Pickens writes: "RedOrbit reports that a new study shows that the patterns of collaboration between Wikipedia contributors have a direct effect on the data quality of an article. "These collaboration patterns either help increase quality or are detrimental to data quality," says Sudha Ram at the University of Arizona. Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries so Ram and graduate student Jun Liu randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level and applied a data provenance model. "We used data mining techniques and identified various patterns of collaboration based on the provenance or, more specifically, who does what to Wikipedia articles," says Ram adding that they identified seven specific roles that Wikipedia contributors play: Casual Contributor, Starters, Cleaners, Copy Editors, Content Justifiers, Watchdogs, and All-round Editors. (PDF starting on page 175) Starters, for example, create sentences but seldom engage in other actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with resources and links. Some users – the all-round contributors – perform many different functions. "We then clustered the articles based on these roles and examined the collaboration patterns within each cluster to see what kind of quality resulted," says Ram. "We found that all-round contributors dominated the best-quality entries. In the entries with the lowest quality, starters and casual contributors dominated." To generate the best-quality entries, people in many different roles must collaborate and that software tools could help improve the overall quality of articles. "A software tool could prompt contributors to justify their insertions by adding links," says Ram, "and down the line, other software tools could encourage specific role setting and collaboration patterns to improve overall quality.""