- Spittal - Disambiguation article; but constructed in a nonparallel way. Also, the second half of the disambiguation is mispunctuated. Grade: check-minus.
- 34th United States Congress - Political Parties - The title of this article is inconsistent with the MOS (it should be something like "Members of the 34th United States Congress by political party"). I was hoping for an analysis of the political parties in the 34th Congress; however, all I got was a list of members of the 34th Congress by political party. This is content for an almanac, not for an encyclopedia. (If there were a WikiData, I'd recommend moving it there.) At least it lists one reference (well, two, but they're really the same thing, just published under two different names). Grade: F.
- Winfield, Missouri - This is a RamBot article with basically only one addition, two sentences about the police department that seem very much out of place given that the mayor (which one would think is a more significant fact than police chief) is not listed. On the other hand, it's not all that badly abused. No sources other than the census data, but then there's not much to sourced besides the census data....Grade: D+.
- Saša, Tin i Kedžo - This article is about a defunct Croatian boy band. I suppose it passes notability because they're the first boy band in Croatia. The article has multiple grammatical errors, probably because it was written by someone with a limited grasp of English, and never copyedited. Two stub tags, although frankly I can't see what one would want to add to this article. No sources. Grade: D-.
- Redbird Arena - This stub is about a sports arena in Normal, Illinois. Nothing obviously wrong with it, although it is choppily written. Probably a candidate for merging into the article about Normal, although I suspect many people would object to that. No sources. Grade: D+.
- Synopsis - This article is basically a dictionary definition, and it should likely be replaced by a disambiguation which includes a reference to Wiktionary. The article also seems to be limited in scope without acknowledging that it is limited in scope. Judging by the number of spammy links at the bottom, this article was likely either created to support linkspam, or has been taken over for that purpose. If there are sources, they're not cited as such. Grade: D
- Fine Time - This is a nearly zero-content article apparently about a song. This is another example of an article that belongs in a hypothetical WikiData, although there is a tiny bit of trivia. No sources. Grade: D-
- Le Roy Township, Minnesota - As minor place articles go, this one is slightly better that most, although that's not saying much. The article has been somewhat expanded from the Rambot-created original. The only major organizational complaint is that the "Cemetaries" section is strangely organized underneath "History". Has one reference source. Grade: C
- Bathylutichthys - A fish stub. Says almost nothing, but at least doesn't do so badly. Has one reference source. Grade: C
- Jean Baptiste Perrin - This biographical article of a physicist is at least half-decent. There are minor grammatical issues and some portions that are sloppily written, but the main defect of this article is that it's too short to avoid having the infobox override the navigational box at the bottom of the article. I'm not sure that anything can be added to this article, though, which suggests that the infobox is too large, or something like that. Anyway, definitely the best article out of this lot. Not that that's saying much. Sadly, no sources, which hurts its grade considerably. Grade: C-
Now, I realize that this is only ten articles out of well over a million, but still.....
To be fair, the number of visitors to the average random article is much smaller than the number of visitors to the average random article that people are actually interested in reading. For instance, pick ten topics at random out of your head and check their articles; it'll be much better than a random search. All this proves is that Wikipedia has too many obscure articles on random topics, not that its important articles are actually bad.
ReplyDeleteAt least 99% of the hits on the encyclopedia are targeted, not random, so a targeted analysis of the encyclopedic quality is more valid than a random analysis. You were just looking at the quality out in the long tail, which is admittedly bad.
Hey Babe, you're on fire! Great posts lately.
ReplyDeleteJust a note for those not familiar with Worldtraveller who Kelly mentions in the last two posts. He is one of the greatest featured article writers the English wikipedia ever had. He quit in disgust last year, tired of watching his work deteriorate, and tired of a lack of progress in efforts to improve the quality of wikipedia content.
Cyde's been at the Kool Aid again. You cannot judge quality by a few, much accessed articles, Cyde. The model is not to produce articles people want that are of very high quality. It's to produce articles on everything.
ReplyDeleteAs is your wont, you abuse the word "valid". An encyclopaedia's "quality" is a function of its entirety, not of those parts of the highest quality. The worst article in Britannica is superior to nearly all the articles in Wikipedia. That says something that no amount of denial can unsay.
The Perrin article has one good source, although it is listed as an "external link". It is the official website of the Nobel Foundation, which has good information of Perrin given that he won the Nobel Prize.
ReplyDelete