14 DAY TRIAL // For quite some time now, Wikipedia has faced a couple of problems, less new editors, and poor quality content. A new study, albeit a relatively small scale one, shows that none of these problems may be as big as it may seem.
"Increasing participation is one of the top five priorities in our strategic plan. But when we talk about retention of newly registered editors, some readers and experienced editors rightfully wonder exactly how many edits by newbies actually improve the free encyclopedia," an entry on the Wikipedia bog read.
So Wikipedia set out to answer the question with a small study of first time editors. The scope was to determine the quality of these first time edits.
"We took a randomly selected batch of 155 new registered users on the English Wikipedia who made at least one edit in mid-April of this year," Wikipedia explained.
"We looked at their first edit and ranked it on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being pure vandalism and 5 being an edit that is excellent, meaning it adds a significant chunk of verified, encyclopedic content and would be indistinguishable from a very experienced editor," it added.
The results, which can be seen in the graph shows that most content is good enough to remain on Wikipedia, though there are a large number of poor quality edits and downright vandalism as well.
23.2 percent of edits were made in bad faith, but the rest was from editors that wanted to help out.
However, 19.4 percent of those didn't meet Wikipedia's quality standards so they couldn't have been kept as is. All of the rest were good contributions to Wikipedia.
For comparison's sake, Wikipedia has data taken from 2004. While there are considerably fewer vandalism attempts, the bulk of the edits were of acceptable quality.
What's remarkable is that the level of quality is on par despite stricter policies from Wikipedia and much fewer obvious articles to contribute to. What's more, the number of editors has risen dramatically, 1,800 signed up and made an edit now rather than just 60 in 2004.
