Quality Indicator

We want high-quality wiki pages, right ? How in the world do we measure “quality” ?

… insert that famous quote here, about people improving what is measured …

If only we had some way of *measuring* quality…

User stories:

• Impatient man wants to learn something about some unfamiliar term he’s stumbled over. Say, “hive mind”. Rather than read every wiki page titled “HiveMind”, he only has time for one or two, so he picks the ones with the highest quality rankings.
• Patient WikiGnome wants to improve a wiki. He searches for the pages with the lowest quality rankings, and improves them (or perhaps deletes those pages, or perhaps makes the page into a redirect).

Is “quality” really only one thing, or would it be better to have more than one indicator?

• 1 global indicator
• A few indicators such as “timeliness”, “amount of peer review”, etc.
• A different indicator for every user – individualized Amazon-like “if you liked that wiki page, you’ll probably also like these wiki pages …”

Possibilities

amount of peer review

• one way to measure quality: Some wiki allow users to add pages to their watch list. Display in the footer exactly how many people have added that particular page to their watch list. If that number is zero, it tells me that no one is watching this page. So then there’s not much peer review – so probably not as reliable as pages with many people to protect it from vandals and to watch for more subtle problems.

subjective numerical quantities

• A manual “thumb up”, “thumb down” rating: (number of people who clicked thumbs-up) - (number of people who clicked thumbs-down). Perhaps 2 different ratings for the page: thumbs-down on the title indicates that I think this subject is off-topic; thumbs-up on the title but thumbs-down on the contents indicate that I think the subject is on-topic, but the contents are not (yet) up to standards. See RatedPages.

objective numerical quantities

• the number of pages linking to the page
• the number of out-going wiki-links on the page
• The number of views and/or edits ?
• calculated readability index (sentence length, etc.) – see CommunityWiki:PlainTalk.
• what else?

(Title of Possibility here)

• A numeric score, mathematically combining many/all of the above numerical quantities (How does Google calculate their ranking index?)

(Title of Possibility here)

• (how else can we measure quality ?)

Implementations

Activity

Terminology

Problems

People may try to “game the system” to artificially inflate some scores and deflate other scores.

See Also

Contributors

CategoryFeature