Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-18/News and notes

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Commons reaches ten million files

It's worth noting that the two-fold increase in the past eighteen months is due in part to a great increase in Moving files to the Commons during that time. – Athaenara ✉ 12:42, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This problem is going to come to a head eventually. Commons is very lacking in administrative resources, yet a few people keep dumping more and more files there. Gigs (talk) 13:17, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "this problem" and "a few people"? – Athaenara ✉ 22:22, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Newbe edits

It looks to me as though the "changes" between 2004 and 2011 are not significant.

Aside from that though, I'm left wondering what the assessment criteria were. A "vandal" edit is fairly obvious, but what makes a single edit "excellent" instead of "average"?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 14:50, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Ohms law. Let me describe the criteria for you more:

An excellent edit was marked as one that added a paragraph or more of text that included a reference, or as I said in the post, an edit which would be indistinguishable from that of a very experienced editor. Remember these are people's first registered edit only though, which is why we handed out only one five in each sample.
Acceptable edits did not add a significant amount of content that was verified, but the edit did not obviously violate policy or guideline and would not likely be reverted.
A low quality edit is one that was clearly made in good faith, but which was very poor in quality and would likely be reverted -- like someone adding a broken link to an image. And vandalism is pretty obvious, like you said.

As far as changes between the two years... the big change is that while there wasn't a large decrease in the percent of decent edits made by newbies, the actual amount of newbies showing up and making edits in 2011 is enormously bigger. 60 in one of the days we looked at then and 1,800 on Monday last week, to give you an idea of the difference. But in any case, the most striking conclusion to me is not a change between the years. It's that in both of the two years we sampled, the majority of first edits made newbies are good. Cheers, Steven Walling at work 16:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info, Steve. :)

Let me state first, my complements. I don't at all want to be all negative about this, since overall I think that this is definitely a good idea.

"Quality" is rather inherently subjective, so any metric where you're attempting to assess quality is going to be imperfect. The problem that I see though is "did (or didn't) not add a significant amount of content". I mean, I don't see someone who corrects a bunch of spelling or grammatical errors making any less valuable contributions then someone who adds paragraph(s) of text to an article. And then there's the issue of contributing "significant" amounts of content over several (usually consecutive) edits...

I don't think that the entire study is flawed or anything, but I don't personally see the utility in considering anything other then "vandal"/"non-vandal" edits.

As to the amount of editors in the samples, I agree with you wholeheartedly that the raw increase in editors is one of the most significant findings. If I had written the piece about this I probably would have lead with that information, actually.

Thanks again for your reply.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 19:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You're completely correct that any measure of quality is inherently subjective. In thinking about the methodology and its flaws (and there are flaws) it's important to keep in mind that this was a working experiment to get a general understanding for the Wiki Guides project. We just needed to get an idea of how many first edits by new accounts are any good at all. Any other questions, such as the value of WikiGnoming versus the value of an entire new article, were sort of outside of our scope for that sampling. Steven Walling at work 23:28, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]