Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Reliability of Wikipedia" in English language version.
Good samaritans with less than 100 edits made higher-quality contributions than those with registered accounts and equal amounts of content. In fact, anonymous contributors with a single edit had the highest quality of any group. But quality steadily declined, and more-frequent anonymous contributors were anything but Samaritans; their contributions generally didn't survive editing... The authors also recognize that contributions in the form of stubs on obscure topics might survive unaltered indefinitely, inflating the importance of single contributions...Objective ratings of quality are difficult, and it's hard to fault the authors for attempting to find an easily-measured proxy for it. In the absence of independent correlation, however, it's not clear that the measurement used actually works as a proxy. Combined with the concerns regarding anonymous contributor identity, there are enough problems with this study that the original question should probably be considered unanswered, regardless of how intuitively satisfying these results are.
We have identified Wikipedia as an informative and accurate source for Pathology education and believe that Wikipedia is potentially an important learning tool for of the 'Net Generation'.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)We have identified Wikipedia as an informative and accurate source for Pathology education and believe that Wikipedia is potentially an important learning tool for of the 'Net Generation'.
Einige Wikipedia-Artikel sind für Laien schlicht zu kompliziert, viele zu weitschweifig, urteilten die Tester. [Some Wikipedia articles are simply too complicated for laypersons, many too long-winded, judged the testers.]
Middlebury professor Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said: 'I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.'
The public has a firm idea of what an 'encyclopedia' is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti—and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Wikipedia—both its genius and its Achilles heel—is that anyone can create or modify an entry. Anyone means your 10-year-old neighbor or a Nobel Prize winner—or an editor like me, who is itching to correct a grammar error in that Wikipedia entry that I just quoted. Entries can be edited by numerous people and be in constant flux. What you read now might change in five minutes. Five seconds, even.
Good samaritans with less than 100 edits made higher-quality contributions than those with registered accounts and equal amounts of content. In fact, anonymous contributors with a single edit had the highest quality of any group. But quality steadily declined, and more-frequent anonymous contributors were anything but Samaritans; their contributions generally didn't survive editing... The authors also recognize that contributions in the form of stubs on obscure topics might survive unaltered indefinitely, inflating the importance of single contributions...Objective ratings of quality are difficult, and it's hard to fault the authors for attempting to find an easily-measured proxy for it. In the absence of independent correlation, however, it's not clear that the measurement used actually works as a proxy. Combined with the concerns regarding anonymous contributor identity, there are enough problems with this study that the original question should probably be considered unanswered, regardless of how intuitively satisfying these results are.
Einige Wikipedia-Artikel sind für Laien schlicht zu kompliziert, viele zu weitschweifig, urteilten die Tester. [Some Wikipedia articles are simply too complicated for laypersons, many too long-winded, judged the testers.]
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Wikipedia—both its genius and its Achilles heel—is that anyone can create or modify an entry. Anyone means your 10-year-old neighbor or a Nobel Prize winner—or an editor like me, who is itching to correct a grammar error in that Wikipedia entry that I just quoted. Entries can be edited by numerous people and be in constant flux. What you read now might change in five minutes. Five seconds, even.
Middlebury professor Thomas Beyer, of the Russian department, said: 'I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point.'
The public has a firm idea of what an 'encyclopedia' is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti—and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)