User talk:TCO/Improving Wikipedia's important articles

Kiefer krits

Hi TCO, Let me make some comments, which may be new (at least regarding your report).

1. The GA and FA standards have improved in the last years, so that old GAs and FAs need not be comparable. You might consider correcting for the probability that an old GA is not up to snuff by sampling e.g. 2008 GA's and finding how many of them failed GAR (or required a nontrivial work to meet current standards). You might also look at recent GAR failures and see when their status was granted. These questions could make a nice topic for a M.A/S. thesis in statistics/epidemiology.

2. One man's meat is another man's Poisson: Eyeballing is difficult because count data typically has higher variability than normal-Gaussian data. The Poisson distribution's mean and variance are the same. This makes it hard to detect changes from noise. A bit more skepticism about FA decline may be warranted.

Cheers,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 21:48, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

2. Good that you removed some of the names of hard working persons.

Cheers,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 21:48, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm not a statician. It is business case style analysis. We could get Bayesian though. Make me a bet for how much the story changes and what direction, with more data.  :) TCO (talk) 23:14, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

I've often proposed that persons take Ramsey tests (c.f. C. S. Peirce). I am delighted by your offer! :)

 Kiefer.Wolfowitz 01:41, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Criticism (B article's are decent.)

(transferred from essay, want to keep that clean)-TCO

It would be valuable if we could have a process to identify Decent articles. --Ettrig (talk) 13:26, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

In practice thats probably covered by high level C and B class articles. Articles in most encyclopedias tend towards stubs and start class. -- User:Geni

I never thought of that, but after looking up random not-so-famous chemical elements in online Britannica, it is pretty true. It does give an enhanced sense of perspective when looking at how our articles on sodium and chlorine are terrible by our standards! Double sharp (talk) 04:47, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

TFA ==> TVA

You have suggested many improvements, here and elsewhere. I suggest that we concentrate on reforming TFA. TFA now runs on the premise that quality criteria are absolute. This entails the assumption that importance of content is inconsequential.

I think we should argue that Wikipedia prime space should be used for highlighting the most valuable articles. An article is more valuable if it is more interesting. It is also more valuable if the content is important. To me this seems unescapably true.

We then come to problems of personal taste and values. How should interest be guaged? How importance? What weight should be given to interest and importance in relation to quality? These questions should be addressed using wisdom of the crowd methods, as is normal in Wikipedia.

To start with, we can use page views to guage how interesting an article is. As measures of importance we can use a combination of wikilinks and VA. But again, this should of course be open to debate. If we multiply pageviews, interwiki links and 10 to the power of (4 minus the VA level) we get a good representation of the value of the content.

Given this, we could replace TFA with TVA (Today's Valuable Article). FA's and GA's compete for this spot. The value of FA's could for example get an extra factor of 10000, to represent the additional value of the additional quality.

If it is too difficult to dethrone TFA in one strike, an alternative could be to experiment with alternating days or parallell presentations, to see how they compare.

--Ettrig (talk) 08:43, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I would support having GAs of important articles rather than FAs of trivia. A more small step in that direction would be to just prioritize importance of FAs. Right now, there is a very helper given for importance (20 language translation) but the bulk of the weight goes to crufty anniversary stuff. The problem there is that we are starting to get down to an issue of promoting one FA per day. And some of the old bank has decayed or was low standard. So eventually we may not be able to prioritize much at all.

With regard to VA, we are already there. I got help to see that only 3 of the VA's (10 000) had not been TFA. I nominated Saturn, up today. The other two will be up shortly. So we are practically out of important articles for TFA already now. (Interesting thing with the FA standard, with the raising of the standard and the decay, a large number of the listed FA's are not FA quality. So FA is even more marginalized than the list shows. GA for the important articls is a much more realistic and fruitful vision to pursue.) --Ettrig (talk) 15:17, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Another idea could be to give GA their own slot and just have them prioritize by importance. It is easier to add then to change/take-away. The FA troglodytes will still scream bloody murder (they like that slot, hence the fight against TFL and DYK), but community would probably support it for the GAers (as they did with TFL.)TCO (talk) 14:51, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia will never be top-down

• Hello. Your arguments have some intuitive appeal on their surface, but they seem to fall apart when you drill down into them. They do so for two reasons:

1. Wikipedia will never be top-down. It will forever be bottom-up. The FAs are what they are because FA writers have decided, based on their own purely personal interests, to write what they want to write. You cannot complain about FA/FAC not covering important articles (or articles that some people feel are important), since that is solely and directly determined by Wikipedia's fundamental nature as a bottom-up, volunteer online community. People write what they feel like writing.
2. Alas, the essay just has various little twinges of ad hominem. It is never really explicit, but any Wikipedian (and probably non-Wikipedians) can easily read between the lines. These ad hominem moments really and truly put a dent in your overall credibility.

• Regarding #1: the answer – the only answer that is truly in line with the "Wikipedia way" – is to start a WikiProject that promotes Vital Articles to FAs. You complain almost bitterly about roads, hurricanes, etc., but those were driven by one or two dedicated editors with the full support of relevant Wikiprojects. Imitate their success. –OneLeafKnowsAutumn (talk) 01:01, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

I think we need to have incentives that reward the achievement of what is needed. IOW, barnstars or stars or something that reflects achievements that matter. This would then drive SOME significant improvement...in a very bottom up way. Also, I think we underestimate the importance of non-regulars. There were 155 people writing an FA. So it is not just about the people that we think of as super FA producers (and note, there is an inverse correlation of page views to production...so just going by number of FAs gives you the wrong idea of real contributors).

I think there is a common theme of running more mechanical articles. It is not just happenstance... The problem is that they don't really benefit readers, but are churn. If you really love hurricanes...get Andrew done.

I'm not that concerned with "hurting my credibility". Either the points are right or wrong. Regardless of what I mix in. You're discussing issues of communication style, not content. (And I've indulged in about 1% of such things as my opponents...I guess they scream louder since my points were so good. Was totally waiting for some super buttoned up response [super logic and organization and prose]...and was disappointed.)

Yeah, there is a lot of conservatism and vested interests that don't like change. Just like with WikiCup. That said, even if it doesn't change, I will put a mirror to the face. Nothing wrong with that. And I think it is important to step back and consider the bigger picture. It's really lacking around here a lot.TCO (talk) 01:35, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

• You've been around for a while. You know why "important" articles don't get done: they are simply too broad (and rarely, too controversial) to handle. Look at the painful series of train wrecks known as Roman Cathodlic Church FACs. Now, some people say that some of that was prejudice, and it is not mathematically impossible that one or two people involved were guilty of that, but (believe it or not) that is actually irrelevant. The RCC is just a huge huge huge topic, and (arguably) it can never be covered up to FA standards. [There's one well-known FA that is similarly broad and AFAIK still stands as FA despite being low-quality, but that one is just too radioactive in arenas far outside of Wikipedia for any volunteer editor to touch.]
• You didn't answer my comments at all. I think your essay, while it points up a problem in article coverage, can only lead to one thing: a wikiproject. FAC is utterly irrelevant to your concerns. You are screaming at the Fish and Wildlife Department regarding a problem that is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation. It is not FAC's responsibility to adjust the coverage of articles submitted. The fact that you are barking at the wrong people adds to the general air of ad hominem... –OneLeafKnowsAutumn (talk) 01:55, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

I didn't notice you had a specific question, man, sorry. The issues at FAC and with lack of improvement overall are mostly separate issues. Both came up in the course of the analysis. I'm not "shouting at FAC". If anything, I see the concerned audience as much wider. The shouting and interest has mostly come from them. At least they care...

I do not concede that articles don't get done for only one reason. (And there is a numbered rebuttal to your claim on difficulty.) To make a simple example, if we stopped allowing star display for obscure articles, people would not work on them to FA standards. (And I'm not advocating that...it's a thought experiment to make a point...that incentives drive results.) Similarly, people play the WikiCup game based on ease of producing certain content versus the points they get. Another thought experiment would be page-view weighting for the scoring. Do you really think that no change would result in behavior then? Lastly, it is possible to find articles that are high view, high importance that are not just categories (so there is SOME low hanging fruit within the high hanging fruit.)

TCO (talk) 02:06, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Maunus's points which TCO has not responded to

(transferred by TCO from essay...please don't edit into the authored user essay)

1. [TCO has a false assumption] Wikipedia is not a company that provides a service for profit and hence there is no reason volunteers should consider maximizing "value to the reader" to be the most important aspect of editing, or that they should be discouraged from doing what they are best at in order to do what "maximize value". The market logic that the study is based on does not apply to wikipedia.

2. I [Maunus] am not writing to maximize value for the "average wikipedia reader" that is calculated from page view statistics, but for the specific group of wikipedia readers who want to know about my area of expertise.

Requested response

1. Volunteer projects still have goals and social efficacy and such. (For instance article improvement over time is touted. Or consider if articles were written that literally not a single person read. Obviously efforts to make the website work for mobile and all the like show that outreach is a key part of the mission.)

2. Yeah...you are an interesting case. A niche academic. Good point.

12.133.26.2 (talk) 03:13, 31 August 2013 (UTC) (TCO)

I think a lot more editors than you might think fit the description in 2. - including perhaps most of the ones you have designated "star collectors".User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 19:46, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for this essay

I came to your user page "Improving Wikipedia's important articles" from the link on the Million Award page. Thank you for your perspective on how to identify articles in especially crucial need of improvement. As one of the Wikipedians active in WikiProject Psychology and WikiProject Genetics, I am attempting to identify articles within the scope of thise projects to bring up to GA status and then to FA status. You have provided some good ideas about what to keep in mind as I go forward with that. See you on the wiki. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 15:45, 26 November 2014 (UTC)