Submissions/Measuring Quality Content: Article Feedback and Featured Articles

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

78

Title of the submission
Measuring Quality Content: Article Feedback and Featured Articles
Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
Presentation
Author of the submission
Adam Hyland
E-mail address
protonk@gmail.com
Username
Protonk
Country of origin
United States
Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Last year Wikipedia debuted a new tool for reader feedback: the Article Feedback Tool (AFT). The AFT presents a unique dataset with which to test the assessment decisions slotting articles into good or featured status. Anonymous and registered editors were given a chance to provide a quick numerical rating (rated 1 to 5 on four categories) on the article page itself. Approximately 9,550,000 ratings were recorded across almost 800,000 articles.

I use this information to diagnose the effectiveness of the English Wikipedia's project quality assessment, particularly good articles, featured articles and featured lists. Past research efforts made simple comparisons between featured articles and the remainder of the dataset--this presentation hopes to show a strong and statistically valid relationship between article feedback and project quality assessment. But not just that! It is not too surprising to show the top 1% of all articles are significantly above average in terms of reader ratings.

By taking advantage of the time frame under which the publicly available data were gathered, we can see how ratings for articles which entered or left the Featured or Good status during the course of observation changed. From the reader's perspective, when does the improvement or decline occur? Distinction between good and featured status is noticable in reader ratings in the aggregate, but does that significance dissapear when we look only at articles which transitioned from good to featured status? Experienced Wikipedians "know" that the featured article process involves serious copyediting and improvement for many articles but this bit of tribal knowledge is not necessarily borne out by the data.

I also provide suggestions for future use of the AFT as a data source--a source which will only grow in value as the period of observation increases.

All in all this presentation is a quick walkthrough of inside/outside rating system and outcomes and where the two may diverge. Graphs and animations aplenty with nary an equation or summary table in sight, unless you read the paper!

Track
WikiCulture and Community; Research, Analysis, and Education
Length of presentation/talk
10-20 minutes depending on need.
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Hopefully, yes.
Slides or further information (optional)
Early drafts of the research work available at: User:Protonk/Article_Feedback and source code available on Github.
Special request as to time of presentations


Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

  1. --Amakuha (talk) 05:21, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Signing as an individual. Harej (talk) 20:26, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  3. CT Cooper · talk 19:19, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Fabrice Florin (talk) 07:19, 30 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Graham87 (talk) 13:01, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  6. As a WMF contractor working on the new version of the tool, it would be fascinating to see this data brought to life! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Thuvack (talk) 17:55, 21 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  8. NaBUru38 (talk) 18:09, 7 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Emw (talk) 20:27, 16 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  10. But also DGG's! Johnbod (talk) 01:06, 5 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]