Possible "major points and findings" (BROAD focus)
Wikipedia's been around for 9 years. A large number of users have been around for 4 - 8 years. The impression (and anecdotal impressions are by no means necessarily wrong for the want of a formal research project) relates to users who do patrolling, content issue fixing, tagging, dispute handling, and see the issues close up in detail, and get to know what problems are common; tool writers and admins who get asked for help, etc. The same issues keep coming up. The theme of "anyone can edit" vs "high quality" seems to be quite common in debates on editing process and policy. Asking this head on may be valuable.
But more generally, it's largely anecdotal. In a way, that's the point of this taskforce, to choose people of significant and varied experience and see what they feel and what views and conclusions they reach. Much of what we're doing here is drawing on collective experience because these areas are well experienced but not necessarily well theorized or researched (indeed in complex areas and systems, early research can miss the point that experience quickly highlights -- ie the idea may come first, the research to check it comes after).
That said, if it's not an issue then it won't get much buy-in from the group here as a whole.
Some random ideas :)
What could we try to measure in order to test this notion?
1) The easiest. Take a list of 50 internationally recognized scholars in different field, ask them to pick up two articles in their fields and give a mark 1 to 10 (1 = substandard or non-existent; 10 = excellent quality).
2) More difficult. Tag important specialized articles (may be ask projects to deliver a list) and look at the dynamics of their volume increase. I am sure most of them are small and not expanding.
On WP in en, fr and hu you can look at the quality statistics from the assessment schemes. If you want to locate the poor-quality-but-important articles, you can do this with our new bot that is likely to go live very soon. The new bot will also give an importance score, which uses quite a sophisticated algorithm based on 3 (or often 4) parameters. I would encourage this task force to take a look at what the Elements project on en has done with this sort of information - they often focus their collective effort on specific articles they think are important but most needing work. They use this graphic to show very clearly where the work needs to be done. The result - this small but active WikiProject now has 14 FAs and 18 GAs - about a quarter of all their articles in total, and probably more FAs than all of the rest of chemistry combined (I'm ashamed to say!).
My basic point - if you give a tool to editors that helps them find and track the articles that need work in their area of interest, they will use that tool to focus their efforts. Walkerma 17:55, 6 January 2010 (UTC)