Summary:Talk:Task force/Wikipedia Quality/Archive 1/Topics related to content quality

Starting point

Yaroslav Blanter felt it would be useful to note the similar discussion ruwiki was having on content quality (ru:Википедия:Проект:Качество/Проблемы):

1. Low quantity concerns generally, including those articles where lay-editors specialist knowledge to contribute - science, social sciences, humanities
2. Sometimes even areas of general but niche interest are not covered in a satisfactory way (eg bios of Hungarian artists)
3. Review articles are often sub-standard and non-existent (eg: "French music")
4. Content erosion, for example once refereed, even FAs are prone to new users re-writing it, and there is no set approach if the user is uncooperative
5. No guarantee that even uncontested articles will be "correct"
6. Articles created by newcomers are often sub-standard
7. Pictures are often not available
8. Info on current or changing matters is not always up to date
9. FA and GA are so difficult that many do not attempt them, which diminishes quality efforts.

General discussion

Woodwalker felt this mirrored his view on content erosion. He thought several of the points related to "project completeness" and wondered if there were any reasons the ruwiki community doubted "eventualism" (the philopsphy that eventually all content will be covered by someone or other). He also wondered if there was much translation to and from that language, and asked how Flagged revisions had impacted the wiki (size of community and quality of content).

Yaroslav Blanter stated that Flagged revisions was in a very simple state (no vandalism, categories, one internal link, and "a couple more requirements") which was very useful and saved "a ton of vandalism fighting". There had not been a noticeable increase in editors from this, (Yaroslav Blanter did not reference a loss of editors either). They have about 500 users who can flag articles and another 500 whose edits will be automatically flagged. As a project, they translate a lot of content from enwiki (a "standard second language for Russian speaking users") and a few from frwiki/dewiki. But they lack speakers in (for example) Japanese. A Meta project targeting this difficulty "in a systematic way" (ie more than top 1000 articles) would be nice.

Woodwalker suggested that in line with his post on content erosion solutions could include moving WikiProjects to Meta, searching for specialist writers on other projects to join these project-wide WikiProjects, and note the same issues exist elsewhere.

Yaroslav Blanter felt facilitation of translation (talk page and article) would be needed if the project-wide WikiProjects used English as a common language. Perhaps artiles could be refereed in some areas as well. He did not agree with "eventualism" as a reliable approach. Because in some areas only 100 - 500 people in the world might be able to write an article to reasonable quality, and likely none were editors or would ever do so. He suggested 3 possible solutions:

1. To approach individual experts and ask them to create an article (top-down approach).
2. To see when someone creates a stub and then approach to these experts and ask to referee the article and to help with building up the structure (bottom-up approach).
3. To rise the Wikipedia status to such a way that creation of say an FA would be equated in status to publishing in Nature (the most prestigious scientific journal). Then people would do it themselves.

He feels the latter is most desirable, but "not very directly dependent on us".