[Wikipedia-l] Re: 90000 articles

Mon Nov 11 14:56:29 UTC 2002

Larry Sanger wrote:

>I think we should implement the greatly-pared-down counting scheme we were
>discussing on the list earlier.  We don't have 90K articles.  We have
>about 50K articles and about 40K geographical entries automatically
>created from a database.
>  
>
How about "90K entries, 50K of them articles" on the Main Page? (well, 
the last part needs rewording...)

I thought of something else: Automated "evaluation" of articles. I'm 
uncertain if that has been mentioned before, though.

We could add a score to each article. Certain properties are usually good:
* Many edits (as well as number of contributors)
* many outgoing internal links
* image links
* links to other languages

Furthermore, the following could be scored somehow:
* text to list (* and #) ratio
* text to external links ratio
* text to headings ratio
* text to number of paragraphs ratio

Granted, such a scoring method won't be able to separate all good and 
bad articles from each other. But, it could find many "bad" articles 
(lists, text dumps, stubs, etc.), and give us some kind of statistics 
about where we stand.

Comments?

Magnus