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Tell Me More: An Actionable Quality Model for Wikipedia

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Say you want to contribute to Wikipedia. You sit down in front of your computer after dinner with a nice cup of coffee and wonder what you can do to help. English Wikipedia has an extensive set of cleanup templates that can help you find articles requiring specific improvements. WikiProjects or a tool like SuggestBot can help you find articles related to your interests. We want to combine these and give you a list of interesting articles while at the same time show whether there’s an opportunity for contribution and specific tasks for improving the article.

Some of the recent research examining what makes articles high quality in Wikipedia has taken an editor-based approach, looking at for instance diversity and coordination (Wilkinson and Huberman, 2007)(Kittur and Kraut, 2008), and editor reputation (Adler and de Alfaro, 2007)(Halfaker et al., 2009). While these models of article quality are informative about work practices, they won’t be able to give you straightforward suggestions of what you can do to help on any particular article. Instead we prefer actionable features, those which easily lend themselves to being acted upon by a contributor. Research has shown that the amount of article content has a strong relationship with article quality (see for instance Blumenstock, 2008). This means that “add more” is a reasonable suggestion for improving quality, but we prefer suggestions to cover a variety of tasks, what specific types of more is this article in need of?

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Kids these days: the quality of new Wikipedia editors over time

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I just posted an entry in Wikimedia’s blog explaining part of a study I’m working on with some Wikimedians (Wikipedians working at the Wikimedia Foundation). In response to speculation that the English Wikipedia’s editor decline could be the result of a general decrease in the quality of newcomers to the site, we performed a hand-coded evaluation of the first few edits performed by editors over time.

Overall, we found that the quality of newcomers has not substantially decreased since 2006. While the rate at which these good newcomers have their contributions reverted or deleted has been rising over time, the survival rate of good new editors has been falling. This supports our working hypothesis that the increased rate of rejection for new editors is causally related to the decline in the survival of new editors.

See the full report here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_quality

This analysis is part of a larger contribution in submission to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on Wikis. Stay tuned.

Wikipedia’s Gender Gap

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When we saw Noam Cohen’s January 2011 New York Times article about Wikipedia’s large gender gap, we wondered what light we could shed on the questions and observations raised by Mr. Cohen and the results of the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2009 survey. Drawing upon the experience and the data sets that we’ve accumulated while researching Wikipedia and other online communities for the past decade, we explored Wikipedia’s gender imbalance and wrote a paper about our findings. We’ve recently heard that our paper has been accepted for presentation at WikiSym 2011.

Look below the jump for a summary of our findings. For those who are interested in more details, the full paper is available here on our publications list.

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Goog-411 Hanging Up

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I’m sad to see that goog-411 is shutting down on November 12, 2010. If you haven’t used it, goog-411 is a service you could dial with an 800 number (1-800-GOOG-411) to access a speech recognition system that would help you find businesses in any city and state in the US. I used it frequently on the road, to find places to eat in cities that were coming up on the map. The service was impressively accurate, simple to use, and could be used from *any* phone in the country, generally for free.

Now that I’m an Android user, I confess that Google Maps has just about wiped out the need for GOOG-411. But: I feel sad for all the non-Android folk in the country. What are they going to do now that Google is “putting all of our resources into speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages”? Will their be tools for the non-smart phone generation?

In addition to being sad on its own merits, the shuttering of GOOG-411 is an important reminder that not all useful services can find a way to be paid for. I’m sure that part of the problem for GOOG-411 was that Google could not figure out a way to put ads onto the service without annoying its users. That’s a difficult balance; and one that I’m sad Google could not manage for its excellent goog-411 service.

John

Google TV: Finally a device that recognizes that TV is just a way of consuming content

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The Read/Write Web story on why Google TV might be a game changer (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_tv_will_change_the_way_people_live_their_li.php)
does a nice job of explaining the many advantages of a television device that lets you display all of the content you have permission to display on one device. It has been an amazingly slow path to get here: producers of television content are on the one hand doing deals to get their content onto the Internet, while on the other hand working to prevent people from displaying that Internet content on their televisions! This is a crazy world! We should be focused on creating fair ways to compensate the people who create content, and then working on making the consumption of that content as free as possible. There are thousands of ways to consume a television show — most of them not invented yet — only one of which starts with the show coming over the air, down and antenna, and being displayed on a television device in real-time. I, for one, am very excited to see the Google TV, especially with Google play keeps stopping all the time, to see how much it opens the television platform.

John