Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 11:45, 10 September 2015

Jimbo welcomes your comments and updates. He holds the founder's seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The three trustees elected as community representatives until Wikimania 2017 are Denny, Doc James, and Pundit. The Wikimedia Foundation Senior Community Advocate is Maggie Dennis.

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"Venezuela government controls almost all the newspapers and television stations"

Hello Jimmy. I'm watching your "State of the wiki" talk for Wikimania 2015. There you said that "Venezuela government controls almost all the newspapers and television stations". Where did you get that idea?

That is a typical hoax repeated in many places. Here I gathered some info into two tables, using data from Misplaced Pages articles.

I hope that this data helps to clarify this topic. Regards. emijrp (talk) 14:45, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

1. "The national airwaves are now almost entirely dominated by the government and its obligatory announcements, called cadenas." - Reporters without Borders
2. "In a 2015 report by the Institute for Press and Society (IPYS), over 25 media organizations had changed in ownerships between 2010 and 2015 with the new owners having "a direct relationship" to local governments and the national government that were linked to Chavismo." - see Media_of_Venezuela which links to news about report here.
3. "Under new ownership, the network purged its newsroom and stopped airing live speeches by opposition leader" - Washington Post

Control of the media need not take the form of direct government intervention - threats leading to self-censorship and purchase by government proxies is sufficient. I stand my my assessment, which is in agreement with every serious human rights organization I have seen write about the issue.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:42, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Emijrp: ¡Por vida! _Fortuna 13:51, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Venezuela's situation is definitely a bad one - a cautionary tale that shows that even when freedom of the press is badly abused, abolishing it is a worse cure than the disease. Without suspending RCTV's license and persuading some of the other channels above to take a more 'neutral' position, Chavez still might not have faced another coup attempt; but by pursuing censorship online and off, he overthrew himself - the society he might have wanted was overthrown by one of excessive security and a failure to contemplate or compromise that has left them vulnerable in the oil downturn. For those abroad who wanted to turn back the Pink Tide, a bad leftism is far more useful than the complete overthrow of Chavez' government - indeed, one scarcely hears of the accomplishments of Uruguay, which has surged far ahead of the U.S. on that first press index, or of Bolivia or any other country that has shown that leftist politics can work, and work with democracy and human rights. That said, is the vague connection of the owner of Globovision with government interests really as close as that of Roger Ailes, who is CEO of Fox News? What about MSNBC, given the chumminess between Microsoft and the NSA? Even when you consider Ted Turner, definitely an independent media voice ... what does someone whose land has a higher GDP than Belize have to do with the legendary General Will? He may be independent of government, but what owner of large media is independent of the prerogatives and interests of wealth? I think it may be better to take a more remote, bottom-up view: what happens to you if you use a watt or two to broadcast your video on TV in your block, without getting it cleared by Somebody Better Than You? Then ask what country's media is free. Wnt (talk) 15:15, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

In all countries we should care a lot about journalistic freedom, and about what non-journalistic influences may be impacting what we see and hear and read. Having said that, I think it's unwise to make a comparison that would suggest that things in Venezuela are probably routine - they most certainly are not.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:38, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

That's not really my intent - I don't want to minimize censorship in Venezuela. The resignations at Globovision over their change in editorial policy are certainly a clue that something is particularly wrong there. Still, biased pro-government reports can occur anywhere when emboldened by a lack of competing voices to debunk false claims. Censorship is like Ebola - some people may just have a fever, while others are vomiting blood, and that matters for their prognosis ... but it is always the same virus, waiting for its next victim. I think that (because of the EM frequency licensing structure that Venezuela and the US share) the Internet offers the best alternative to biased, censored, or just "owned" news. For example, Misplaced Pages, a site where people can write and contribute directly, usually does far better at putting complex political issues in context than 99% of media reports. So it concerns me most when censorship is targeted at ordinary people on the Internet. Wnt (talk) 21:29, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

If you assess the situation of Venezuela media using Reporters Without Borders (see #Criticisms of RWB) and The Washington Post... Well, then obviously you will have that impression. In the same fashion that you check who controls the Venezuelan newspapers/televisions, you should check who controls that NGOs and newspapers, and their interests.

I wonder if the world was worried about freedom of expression in Venezuela before Chavez/Maduro, when all the media was private in the hands of businessmen and there were no public ones. Obviously not, because the super-neutral mass media and NGOs didn't report about it.

For a real problem for freedom of expression, see Concentration of media ownership. Here is a table with the most linked mass media as references in Misplaced Pages:

Almost all them owned by rich people, big companies, holdings, banks, etc. I don't see any owned by the poor, do you? Where is their freedom of expression? --emijrp (talk) 16:38, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

The funny thing is, as an exercise in debating, I could take that exact data and make effectively the inverse argument: that the English Misplaced Pages has a left-wing bias. The American right-wing (I'm American, so this is my frame of reference) pretty much considers all of those except maybe the Telegraph and the Mail to be leftie socialist rags, especially the top three in that table. And indeed, it's not hard to find right-wingers online complaining about how Misplaced Pages is a liberal propaganda machine. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 20:22, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Emjirp: That's a good point about the rich being overly represented compared to the poor. However, the media's consisting of mostly 1%-controlled corporate outlets such as the above influences society as a whole, with Misplaced Pages simply using the most reliable sources available. --Rubbish computer 22:32, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

It's a little more nuanced than that - we actually have a choice, and can make the right one or the wrong one. A biased media is not strictly a censored media, which is to say, there are exceptions that slip through. An editor can pick through these back-page stories like Noam Chomsky in order to get a much clearer overall picture of what is going on. The problem is that recently there has been an upsurge of editors insisting that it is not enough that a fact merely be sourced reliably - they want it excluded unless many or most sources happen to mention it. Which is to say, they don't want a comprehensive encyclopedic resource, but a consensus summary that accurately reflects both the facts and the bias of the majority of the sources, without including inconvenient facts that broaden the context. When people see this kind of thing they need to push back hard against it, or yes, Misplaced Pages might as well be run by some big company. Wnt (talk) 12:01, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Getting better?

Is Misplaced Pages getting better? --Bob K31416 (talk) 15:43, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Bob K31416: That depends on how you classify "better". It is growing. Rubbish computer 19:29, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

There was a study before showing it gradually getting more neutral in terms of wording, but still being biased to the left. Unfortunately I can't remember where. Rubbish computer 19:30, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree at it would depend on what you mean by better since there are several ways to interpret better (including more non Western content, Quicker response to vandalism and POV Pushers, improving the software to make editing easier, etc).--65.94.253.185 (talk) 03:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

"It is growing." Well, then it obviously must be better, mustn't it?. Because everyone knows that bigger is better. Q.E.D.

However, if instead of looking at the number of articles it contains and creates (many of which are of mediocre quality) you instead look at the number of active contributing editors, then Misplaced Pages has actually been shrinking since 2007, and continues to do so. Of course, no one involved in Misplaced Pages wants to hear that - especially old guard "well-entrenched" editors who wish to perpetuate, as part of their own Peter Pan denial of changing reality, the period just prior to circa 2007 when Misplaced Pages was in its heyday and had become a web institution. However, since its 2007 zenith at over 50,000 active editors, Misplaced Pages editorial participation has been steadily declining due to it becoming a bureaucratic behemoth with no structure or leadership and a high level of policy creep. By its very nature Misplaced Pages eschews any sort of central planning and conventional expertise. Thus it considers contributions by subject matter experts in real life to be a conflict of interest since they get paid for their expert knowledge, and that's not "the Wikiway" - which is amateur volunteerism. Consequently, Misplaced Pages articles are created mostly by unemployed management consultants, dilettante telephone sanitizers, and a Scouse hairdresser called Rita who mostly contributes on her two half days off work.

Over the intervening years since its 2007 peak Misplaced Pages's culture, which was always feisty and argumentative (but ultimately in a good, constructive way), has now become top heavily bureaucratic and highly confrontational (in an obstructionist and persnickety unproductive way). The rules and guidelines for contributing to the project (which used to be just the "five pillars" of policy guidance) have now reached labyrinthine levels that long ago crossed "Teal Deer" thresholds, becoming internally inconsistent and self-contradictory in the process. This, in turn, only creates more opportunities for daily acrimony and disputes to occur, thereby requiring an ever-increasing volunteer work force of officious and sometimes abusive admin panjandrums to police it. Jimmy Wales has been dismissing suggestions that the project will get worse for years now (despite hard evidence to the contrary), but is on record as stating that he believes the project cannot significantly improve without an influx of new editors who have different interests and emphases (not to mention gender!). Yet Misplaced Pages's complete intransigence - or perhaps its inept incompetence (e.g., the "Visual Editor" debacle); it's actually a lot of both - at abating the ever-increasing levels of acrimonious confrontation and bureaucracy is not only failing to attract his desired new blood, but is preventing what new editors that do venture to dip their foot into the Wikipedian waters from also staying very long, in addition to driving away long established "old guard" editors as well.

On the flip side of the coin, with Misplaced Pages receiving more than ten billion page views every month that keep it in the top ten of the most used websites in the world, and with the project still creating lots of new articles and pages, there are many Pollyannaish Wikipedians that feel everything is simply fine and dandy and generally tickety-boo. Misplaced Pages has continually grown from day one and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. For instance, it hasn't even started to scratch the surface yet when it comes to documenting all the Finnish and Czech ice hockey players, so still plenty of work to do right there. Ask any Misplaced Pages editor and he'll tell you it's "a work in progress" with still no end in sight where that Borgesian day is eventually arrived at when the encyclopedia will have finally documented and defined everything that has ever existed in the world. No doubt the editors of Encarta felt as equally confident and bullish. If Misplaced Pages is bigger and brighter today then it can only be even bigger and brighter still tomorrow. Indeed it can, but one does suspect that such ostrich Wikipedians may have never read this particular article. — not really here discuss 05:56, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Wow, that'a really, really long comment there. I doubt that many people will read all of it. I prefer to be concise. The best available metrics show that the number of active editors is actually increasing modestly, rather than decreasing. Read a recent Signpost article about the data. Cullen Let's discuss it 06:31, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

There ya go, old fella. I've now broken my post up into four separate messages so that even people with IQs less than ambient room temperature, or recovering from cataract surgery, like yourself will now be able to follow it. I also made sure I did it in as many edits as I could in order to maximize my edit count. That way I will soon be a Senior Editor, which will hopefully allow me to wander around Misplaced Pages with a gold star stuck on my forehead like an over-achieving preschooler too. Good call. — not really here discuss 08:15, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the gracious remarks. They reflect well on you, I'm sure. Cullen Let's discuss it 21:13, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

My favorite way of checking this is to "click random article" on 10 articles, and go back and look at them a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. Every time I have tried, it's unambiguous: Misplaced Pages is getting better by this test.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:28, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

So just checking that ten random articles all get longer in any chosen five year span conclusively proves Misplaced Pages is getting better? Wow, that's really scientific! Do you perhaps have any sources you could cite that verify that such a methodology is remotely meaningful of anything? How do your random checks prove the quality of the writing is improving; or that it's becoming more NPOV; or more factually correct; or better sourced? Does you random check methodology conclusively show that the percentage of women editing Misplaced Pages is significantly increasing over every five year span? Or that more articles are being written about Africa than, say, Finnish ice hockey players? BTW, by "citable sources" I mean reliable secondary sources from independent publishers ... not a Signpost article produced by Misplaced Pages as an Orwellian morale-raiser for the troops ; and by "percentage of women" I mean the percentage of real independent thinking women, not women who get paid by, or receive college course credits from, feminists to intrude ultra-feminist POV material into Misplaced Pages anyway they can (because they don't count). — not really here discuss 09:22, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps your could read what Jimbo actually wrote? The word "longer" or any synonym doesn't appear in his post. --NeilN 16:01, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps YOU should read what Jimbo actually wrote. And Jimbo too, because he states below that he "suggested checking the quality." Show me where the word "quality" appears in his two line post? He merely states, "Every time I have tried, it's unambiguous". Unambiguous WRT what? Length, quality, truth, format, sourcing, dates, wombats? It's a meaningless statement. He may have intended "quality" - and I'm sure he did - but it's not what he wrote. He cannot expect readers to magically divine his intent. Incorrectly assuming what another person says goes right to the heart of WP:AGF. It applies just as much to expecting someone to correctly divine what you really meant to say (but didn't) as it does to expecting them not to read something entirely different into what you did say.

His persnickety reaction to my post may have been justified if I had chosen to divine "wombats" given the context of the discussion, but not for choosing any of the others meanings I listed as they are all pertinent. I went with "length" because that is the ONLY objective criterion on my list; all the other criteria require subjective analysis and assessment and are thus POV, therefore they could not possibly be considered unambiguous. — not really here discuss 06:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

"Misplaced Pages is getting better by this test." You were the one who started a rant based on the facile assumption that better equals longer article lengths. --NeilN 18:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

His point is that no method at all was given. Jimmy wrote "My favorite way of checking this is to "click random article" on 10 articles, and go back and look at them a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. Every time I have tried, it's unambiguous: Misplaced Pages is getting better by this test". By what test? By just looking at articles written 5 years, 10 years ago? Peter Damian (talk) 19:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I'd say it was his opinion, just like any of us could compare an article today with what it was like 5 years ago. You might try it with an article chosen with the random article generator, just to get an idea of what it's like to make such a comparison. --Bob K31416 (talk) 19:45, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

No, he assumed Jimbo equated getting better with longer. If someone says to you get better meat at supermarket x than at supermarket y do you assume they're talking about the quantity of meat you get? And the method was given. One test to see if Misplaced Pages is getting better is to look at random articles at specific points in time and see if they're getting better. --NeilN 19:49, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Gee, Gamergate much? That's a lot of questions, and virtually every single one of them contains an invalid premise or is asking me as if I made claims that I did not make. Let me answer your questions, all of them, and then you can go away and never ever post on my talk page again unless you take that chip off your shoulder.

1. "So just checking that ten random articles all get longer in any chosen five year span conclusively proves Misplaced Pages is getting better?" - Checking the length is not what I suggested. I suggested checking the quality. 'any chosen five year period' - not 'any' - the relevant 5 year period, the one ending now. Does checking 10 articles "conclusively prove" anything? Of course not. I said that it's my favorite way - it is something that I do from time to time, and I encourage others to do it.
2. "Do you perhaps have any sources..." No, I don't. I made the method up out of thin air. But it's a good idea, and you should try it sometime. I would actually love it if we had a tool to allow lots of people to do it and track the results across thousands of articles over many years.
3. "How do your random checks prove.. (various things)" - try it and you'll see what I mean. All those things are true.
4. " Or that more articles are being written about Africa than, say, Finnish ice hockey players?" - This particular method is focussed on the quality of individual articles and will completely miss problems with balance across various fields. A different test would be required to deal with that. Again, I told about a favorite way to check on the quality - it is not the only way nor even a comprehensive way. I never claimed it was, so your hostility is unwarranted.
5. As to the rest of your comments - they contain little content but they do reveal your agenda, so thanks for including that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Of course you didn't say 'longer', but since you gave no methodology for assessing 'quality', he was teasing you with 'length'. Given that the random method generally gets you 10 articles that you would never find in a standard reference work, a better method is to start with random articles taken from a standard reference work, and see if Misplaced Pages through time is approaching the quality of the standard work, using an appropriate understanding of 'quality'.

Another method, if you are a specialist in some subject, is to watch the progress about articles in that subject. As you know, I know a little about this guy, and this recent edit was just plain weird. On that measure, it's not getting better at all. And that's despite my occasional attempts at improvement. Peter Damian (talk) 17:19, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Apparently it's not getting better. I have had many differences with Fram, but he is on the mark here. Peter Damian (talk) 09:30, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

@Me? I'm not really here: I know bigger isn't better, I was simply stating a fact. Rubbish computer 11:49, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

@Me? I'm not really here: Do you have a source for the number of active contributors continuing to decrease? --Rubbish computer 12:06, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I have a number of sources (a dozen or so off the top of my head, possibly more) that support most of the points I made in my original post. If I was posting that text into an article they would, of course, have been cited at the appropriate places. But this is a Talk page and I made my comment extempore, not with those sources directly to hand, some of which I have not read in a long while, so I will have to go Google them in order to locate them. There is a possibility that some no longer exist (as some might go back as far as 2009). I will post each source as and when I find it and append it as a bullet underneath this reply. This might take awhile. However, before even starting that process, I first wish to address Jimbo's response(s). — not really here discuss 20:03, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

OK, here is the first reference source for some of what I initially posted (but not re Misplaced Pages contributors getting smaller, those will follow in due course). It can be summed up by the quote: "So long as an illiterate drug addict can override the work of a Harvard professor, Misplaced Pages will never be an authoritative reference." This is the source / basis for my comments at the end of my first paragraph (although obviously I cannot source my own humor) and it is clearly pertinent to the sort of posting interchange that just occurred with user JBL (which is why I found it first). Peter Damian also appears to be having a problem with this obvious flaw regarding how Misplaced Pages works.

• http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_credibility_wikipedia.htm

— not really here discuss 03:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Here is a source reference that covers much of the material in my first post here (it is one of many and no doubt there will be much overlap). It addresses your initial question as to whether I could cite sources for "the number of active contributors continuing to decrease". It states categorically that they decreased by a third from the zenith contributor rate sometime in 2007 until ... well until it was published in October 2013. It doesn't prove the editor count hasn't increased again during the last two years, but I would have thought that highly unlikely, if only based on the sample behavior of people posting on this section of Jimbo's Talk page alone. My comments re paid feminism advocacy that upset Jimbo is based mostly on things I've read elsewhere (hopefully I can find those links too). This source actually contradicts that statement, claiming that articles on women's literature and feminism have actually declined in favor of computer games, which appears to be the exact opposite. I had no idea what "Gamergate" was until Jimbo stuck that label on me in order to try and suggest I had a hidden agenda, and so I had to go read the Misplaced Pages article on that topic in order to find out about it (to be honest I didn't expect to find an article on it). My source reading for that comment came from an Ivy League university source, if I remember correctly, but it may still have been an indirect reference to "Gamergate" without calling it that as such. I'm next going to redact that part of that comment until I can find, re-read and re-assess my sources supporting (or not) its validity. It is not at all critical to many of the other points I made, but it appears to have touched a nerve, and I apologize to Jim for that.

However, there's no hidden agenda here. If Jimbo wants me to declare my agenda then he need look no further than this comment in the Daily Mail article: "Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Misplaced Pages two months after their first try." If Jimbo wishes to fix that problem then he might wish to listen to some of the things I have to say. I consider myself to be such a "well-intentioned newcomer" albeit a "reincarnated newcomer", so I'm probably not as typically naive and more tech savvy than an actual newbie. However, the problem people on Misplaced Pages that are causing new blood not to stick around don't know that, so I've been getting the same treatment. Anyone in retail knows that 99% of people who feel aggrieved by a store or vendor don't bother to go back and complain (where the situation might be resolved) - they just cut the crap and simply start shopping elsewhere. I'm that 1%. If Jimbo sincerely wants to see new blood come into Misplaced Pages and wishes to listen to why it might possibly be leaving from a first hand perspective, then I'll try and explain it to him. If he cannot do anything about it, then so be it; but one always has to understand what the problem is before you can start to fix it. If he simply doesn't want to hear because he believes he's heard it all before, or he wishes to deny that Rome is burning, then that's fine too. I will have given it my best shot.

• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2477432/Is-decline-Misplaced Pages-A-staff-quit-site-thanks-dumbed-software-auto-delete-tools.html

— not really here discuss 05:35, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

While the Daily Mail article above mostly addresses the fact that long time editors are leaving because they are not willing to limbo dance in response to the new initiatives taken by Misplaced Pages in 2007, this study addresses the parallel lack of retention of new blood since 2007. However, it is purely a statistical analysis. Nobody appears to have talked to any exiting newbies to find out first hand why they left. Their reason for leaving is mostly speculative based on statistical analysis of new user accounts. But it does confirm statements I made in my initial post (and have repeated since) re linear falling newbie retention.

• http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

— not really here discuss 06:20, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

This WSJ sourced article from 2009 even comes with a video for the ADD crowd that now appear to dominate Misplaced Pages. Although from 2009, nothing appears to have changed from what was already trending even six years ago. Are Jimbo and the folk at WMF simply just covering their eyes and ears and ignoring these long term trends or are they not able to do anything about them? I don't believe they are completely unaware of them since they keep coming up for discussion at the annual Wikimania meetings. A couple of notable quotes included in this particular source:

- "Misplaced Pages is becoming a more hostile environment, contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."

- "He argued that Misplaced Pages needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on 'smarter metrics' such as article quality."

• http://cuppacafe.com/author/the-perfessor/page/204 (the second discussion item, not the first one on climate change)

— not really here discuss 06:49, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Using Jimbo's method, I pushed the random article button in the side menu 10 times. I only tried the 5 year part of Jimbo's time ranges of 1, 5, and 10 years, which would have been more thorough. Below are the links to the diffs from 5 years ago to now. In cases where the page was created less than 5 years ago, I gave the current version, which is essentially the diff from it's nonexistence 5 years ago to now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Kim_Hee-sun&type=revision&diff=678916354&oldid=383599363
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Dunleavy&type=revision&diff=652077569&oldid=369884357
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Iniquity_%28band%29&type=revision&diff=662721521&oldid=378161666
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Chamaemelum_nobile&type=revision&diff=672437156&oldid=380965667
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Walter_G._Alexander&type=revision&diff=679298867&oldid=372115853
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Uilenburg_%28Amsterdam%29&type=revision&diff=545941955&oldid=379618447
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Tadahito&oldid=536153308
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Niemi&type=revision&diff=540632279&oldid=372534500
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Simon_Petrie&oldid=655260314
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Eoxin_E4&oldid=670415197

--Bob K31416 (talk) 14:32, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Great. I don't have time right now to study all those... how did we do in your random set?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:07, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Here's some comments for each page. (I use "page" because some are disambiguation pages.)

1. Improved. Changed from small article with no figure and almost no cites to moderate sized article with 36 cites and figure.

2. Improved. A disambiguation page that grew with more wikilinks to articles and a discussion of item that was disambiguated and with a figure added for the discussion.

3. Unreferenced and about the same.

4. Uncertain but probably improved. It would take study. Reflist increased from 2 to 6, which is a good sign.

5. About the same with a few lines added.

6. A stub about the same.

7. Stub created about 3 years ago.

8. A disambiguation page that is about the same.

9. A small article created a little less than 5 years ago.

10. A stub created 8 months ago.

Overall, it looks like an improvement to me. (Just an aside, but most of the 10 pages were about people.) --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:03, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I would be careful about inferring from this result anything about the rest of the encyclopedia, considering the limited subject matter of these pages and other factors. --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:31, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I've just read your post so I'm going to take a break from what I'm trying to compose in reply to Jimbo in order to address some obvious issues with what what you just posted so that maybe others can build on it while I get back to the task at hand. You have just spent upto 7 hours (based on the difference in timestamps between posting your initial ten diffs and then posting back with your cursory analysis of them) discovering for yourself first hand the wisdom that Peter posted at 17:19, just under three hours after you first posted your diffs, and which was also the basis of my, "Wow, that's really scientific!" comment made at 9:22, over five hours before you even embarked on this experiment. You just stated in your last two posts:

• "Just an aside, but most of the 10 pages were about people."
• "I would be careful about inferring from this result anything about the rest of the encyclopedia, considering the limited subject matter of these pages and other factors."

What you have just said, in effect, is: "Yeah it appears in a touchy-feely sort of way that some have improved, while a few others have remained about the same, so 'overall, it looks like an improvement' (your exact words)" ... and then having thought about your analysis some more, you felt obligated to post further to add words to the effect: "But this doesn't really mean anything, given how skewed the sample was."

Not only was the random sample skewed, it was a totally indeterminate and meaningless sample rate for an encyclopedia that now boasts however many million? (hundreds of thousands?; I'm afraid I don't have the latest numbers to hand, but hopefully you get my point, and should someone reading this have the actual number, please feel free to replace this caveat text with that value) articles. If you know anything about statistics and probability sampling rates then you would have realized, without embarking on your recent exercise to indulge Jimbo, that in order to make any useful inferences about a sampled population, choosing an insignificant sampling rate is basically counter-productive. It is simply going to fool you into believing that your sampled results mean much more than they really do. That is, it's not going to be predictive of anything meaningful, no matter to what kind of population (in this particular case, all currently extant Misplaced Pages articles) that sampling is applied, because the likely error rate is going to be way too large.

Even if we allow Jimbo the grace of a much larger than normal margin of error in his choice of sample size (since it is meant to be a quick sanity check, frequently applied, rather than a one-shot prediction of who is going to win the upcoming election), sampling only ten random articles would only have had some merit if the encyclopedia was orders of magnitude smaller than it currently is. All the necessary formulae are in that linked article should you wish to perform the math yourself. In layman's terms, the exercise you just undertook is the equivalent of trying to predict the outcome of a general election in the United States by asking only half a dozen voters how they voted as they left the polling booth. Thus it was an exercise in futility before you even began it. Which is the conclusion you came to yourself the more you thought about it afterwards.

It was also what I meant with my "that's really scientific" remark, but I can hardly expect you or anyone else to infer all of the above from that single remark. However, that observation came out in that curt manner due to some other numpty having previous played the WP:TL;DR card who I was also trying to satisfy with my post. IMO the "Teal Deer" contribution to WP guidance is the biggest cause of confrontation on Misplaced Pages (and thus editors leaving) because anyone trying to have intelligent open discourse in order to achieve consensus can be simply closed down by someone else, who cannot provide a convincing counter-argument for anything themselves, by their repeatedly using it to try and silence any arguments they disagree with by simply declaring the more constructive contribution to be longer than a Tweet. No wonder most differences of opinion on Misplaced Pages never reach consensus as they are meant to, but end up in AN/I instead. — not really here discuss 02:06, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I also forgot to add in my comment above, for such a sampling exercise to be meaningful, in addition to the sample being large enough you usually also require a control group reference population in order to make any sense of what your sampled data is telling you. I don't wish to turn this discussion into a Math 101 course so you will have to work that one out for yourself. In this particular case, Misplaced Pages is your friend (but that is not always the case). However, exactly that point had already been made by Peter, as I stated above, before you ever reached the conclusion you did yourself. Please go read Peter's post again. A standard reference work, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, that Peter refers to would be the control group or reference population in this instance. Peter explains in his post that unless you choose some sort of reference point for apples-to-apples comparison then your random sample is going to be fairly useless - such as disambiguation pages incorrectly treated as articles or bios of people or heavy metal bands of dubious notability. If Jimbo had instead randomly selected ten articles from the EB (all of which are written and peer-reviewed by subject-matter experts) and asked, "OK, how does Misplaced Pages treat these same ten topics?" and then compared the Misplaced Pages articles with the corresponding EB ones based on some well-defined and mutually agreed upon definition of what constitutes "quality" then we might actually have the makings of a useful metric. All Jimbo has done is given you a pseudo-metric that looks and feels like it is more scientific / mathematical than it really is. It's the Misplaced Pages equivalent of a proof that all triangles are isosceles. — not really here discuss 02:42, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

In contrast with my earlier comment below, I would like to note that this exhibits real style. I mean, we've got nearly 50Kb of edits here in the past week (plus tens of Kb on other talk pages) and in the middle one finds sighing laments about WP:TL;DR. The care and craftsmanship applied is almost touching. --JBL (talk) 02:47, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Also of course the choice of a username echoing WP:NOTHERE is all class. --JBL (talk) 02:50, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for violating WP:AGF by making your puerile assumptions about the origins of my user name simply to post a personal attack. My user name has absolutely nothing to do with WP:NOTHERE (bit unfortunate that) but is instead a nodding reference to Paul Lake, plus also the fact that I left Misplaced Pages due to encounters with people like you but would infrequently post anonymously now and then to correct things. Interestingly, what I discovered (purely by accident) while posting anonymously is that others paid much more attention to just the edits being made (simply because they had nothing else to go on in order to make entirely invalid and almost libelous assumptions about the person that made them like you just did) such that they never led to any confrontation and were rarely challenged. I only re-registered with a user id. because I had to change my static IP address of some fourteen years or so standing, by which time I had a lengthy Talk page associated with it, and it just seemed easier to redirect to a user name than another IP address. I was reluctant to do that (hence my new user name) for the reasons you just validated. — not really here discuss 03:30, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Making the Wales method work

The wall of text by the editor who is not really here makes exactly one valid point. A sample size of 10 is not big enough to draw serious conclusions. Big deal, everybody knows that already. So the question arises "How could you make this method work to draw serious conclusions?"

• 1. you need to understand that this is just one way to evaluate the improvement of the encyclopedia. It could answer the question "Is the average article getting better?", but ignores completely how many articles there are.
• 2. It would be nice to have some sort of measurement of article quality. Many measures are presumably related to article quality, e.g. size, number of editors editing in the last month or year, number of footnotes, number of tags on the page, and perhaps even the number of see-also links, or illustrations. But these don't really get to the heart of the matter. I wouldn't completely trust the stub, start, C, B, A, FA ratings. They generally seem out of date and inconsistently applied, and probably change in meaning over time. A subjective assessment of quality might be applied (say 1-10) but care would have to be taken to make sure different reviewers rate consistently.
• 3. A sample size of 400 articles should be able to do the job, if you want to test for a 5% change in the proportion of improved articles. (Notice this doesn't depend on the number of articles in the encyclopedia, whether it's 10,000 or 10,000,000 articles)
• 4. Since you want to measure the quality of articles, ditch the disambig pages, but leave in every other type of article, e.g. lists
• 5. I can't see any reason that the random article function, which is actually pseudorandom, shouldn't be good enough. It wouldn't be good enough if for some reason it selected e.g. newer articles, or larger article more frequently. Anybody have any info on the random article function?
• 6. One fly in the ointment is that deleted articles would not be sampled, so the "average article" from 1 or 5 years ago would be biased. Presumably, if our editors believed the encyclopedia was better off without the article, then the bias would work against finding improvement. The missing deleted articles were bad, and now that they're gone the encyclopedia is improved. I doubt the %'age of deleted article is high enough to effect any results however, and you never can tell for sure whether our editors delete good articles.

So it is definitely possible to make this method work, with just a couple quibbles as is usual. I'd suggest doing it over time, say 25 article each week. Then you'd have a large enough sample size to draw conclusions every 3 months, and then 4 samples per year to see how things change over time. Anybody interested? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:27, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Very interested. One twist I'd like to add. Presumably we care a lot about improvements in quality in articles that people actually read, as well as improvements in quality in articles that are more obscure. It might be useful if the random selection of articles were weighted to article popularity.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:32, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

By Friday I'll set up a user page/sandbox, outlining my ideas. I'll bounce the basics off a few people before then. It would be a lot of work just doing one article, but I think it could be designed that it could be done in 30 minutes per article. The subjective quality rating would be the hard part, probably a rubric (rating guide) would have to be developed. The idea of selecting the most popular articles is good, but I only have some vague ideas now on how to do it. I'd have to see at least 5 qualified reviewers sign up before I'd commit to this. It's not a 1 person job. Perhaps call it WP:Random article. One thing I'd insist on, Jimmy Wales could not be a reviewer - people might think he is biased. Sorry Jimmy, you don't get to (have to) do the hard work of rating, but your suggestions on designing the rubric, work flow, etc. would be appreciated. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 11:24, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Welcome to 2014, everyone. - 2001:558:1400:10:84B5:2235:9D3B:1BF5 (talk) 16:48, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Regarding weighting for popularity, one way is to exclude articles with fewer than a certain number of page views in the last 90 days. For the list of 10 pages previously given, here's what their page views were in the last 90 days, along with a very brief description of each page.

1. 25,686 – person

2. 594 – mostly people disambiguation page (dab)

3. 526 – musical band

4. 4,525 – plant

5. 345 – person

6. 866 – city, stub

7. 67 – a given name of people, stub

8. 507 – people dab

9. 321 – person

10. 460 – chemical, stub

--Bob K31416 (talk) 15:18, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, just including articles with 90 day page views above x (say the 50th percentile for all articles) would get articles that a lot more people are interested in. Another, way would be to take articles over a specific length. This would increase the work of the random reviewers quite a bit. Stubs would be very easy to review, but longer articles would take much longer. Also, it then wouldn't make much sense to test if articles with higher page views, or articles with greater size, are positively related to quality - that's essentially in your assumptions.

This brings up the 500 lb. gorilla in the room. Bob's 10 random articles look incredibly weak in content. This might be true for a large percentage (40%?) of our articles. This type of exercise might just end up convincing folks that we need to delete a ton of articles. Some guesses here - we might look at articles with less than 100 page views per month, that have been stubs for over two years, that have less than three sources of any type, and are less than 40 words (all 4, not 1 out of 4), and find that 20% of our articles fit the description. My feeling is that we could probably delete 20% of our articles and lose only about 1% of our page views. I'm not saying I expect this to happen, but do please be prepared for what the data tells us. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:09, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Using a percentile to choose the cutoff seems like a good idea. Also note that there may be a correlation between page views and length of an article, i.e. people may be more likely to come back to view a longer article.

Personally, I wouldn't delete any of those articles because there's always the potential that someone may come by and decide to expand them, it's easier to expand an article than create one, and it's not as if it was a print encyclopedia where space is being taken up.

Just out of curiosity, I pushed the random article button another 10 times.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/Kattakkada_Assembly_Constituency

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/Roger_L._Stevens

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/Graphoderus_bilineatus

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/Delvim_Fabiola_Bárcenas

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/Amphiplica_knudseni

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/Stillwater_Range

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/John_Swift_(politician)

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/Maria_Awaria

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/Small_Cajal_body_specific_RNA_18

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/STK25

--Bob K31416 (talk) 21:42, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Article size statistics can be found at . From these statistics, these random article lists are expected to contain mostly stub or start size articles. (See the red and orange parts of the pie chart.) --Bob K31416 (talk) 22:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I went thru all of the 10 new articles nd my first impression was that they are quite a bit better that the previous ten. My second impression was that I must have been in a bad mood when I went thru the first 10. But still most below 100 page views a month, and pretty short. Definitely we need to do this in a systematic way. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

If we had the following type of data for previous years, do you think that may indicate whether Misplaced Pages is getting better?

All rated articles by quality and importance Quality Importance Top High Mid Low ??? Total FA 1,582 2,516 2,425 1,973 183 8,679 FL 180 702 772 695 100 2,449 A 372 684 788 582 92 2,518 GA 3,269 7,436 14,884 19,906 1,776 47,271 B 17,179 33,284 55,108 71,275 23,764 200,610 C 17,174 54,920 137,483 318,511 93,150 621,238 Start 18,545 93,116 419,560 1,651,070 415,761 2,598,052 Stub 4,257 31,297 277,313 2,812,873 759,594 3,885,334 List 4,947 17,474 54,844 203,691 81,863 362,819 Assessed 67,505 241,429 963,177 5,080,576 1,376,283 7,728,970 Unassessed 113 407 965 16,522 392,464 410,471 Total 67,618 241,836 964,142 5,097,098 1,768,747 8,139,441 About this table

--Bob K31416 (talk) 05:25, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

You know Misplaced Pages pages have a history, right? ‑ iridescent 11:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Two points: first, I note the lower right entry is over 5 million, what is in this list that isn't in our article count? Second, picking up on Iridescent's point, it shouldn't be too hard to look at the table at selected points and provide a summary of changes - absolute increases in counts of higher quality items, plus a measure of relative changes- are we adding low quality faster than we are improving quality of older items?--S Philbrick(Talk) 12:55, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Using data from September 30, 2010 and September 9, 2015 , I constructed the following table of article count for each quality rating.

Quality
	2010	2015
FA	3,237	5,513
FL	1,626	1,988
A	670	1,509
GA	9,772	24,620
B	66,490	103,337
C	71,602	207,091
Start	631,690	1,316,024
Stub	1,621,445	2,728,973
List	54,967	178,726
Assessed	2,461,499	4,567,781
Unassessed	394,094	504,314
Total	2,855,593	5,072,095

In the table, article counts for each quality category significantly increased over the last 5 years. --Bob K31416 (talk) 20:42, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
From the table, on the average over the last five years, there is a net gain in the group of categories of Good Article and above, of 10 articles per day. --Bob K31416 (talk) 05:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Another method

I made a start earlier this year on this, using the methodology I mentioned above, i.e. take a standard reference work, in this case Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, randomly select articles from there, and compare with the corresponding WP article. See the small sample on the page I just linked to. The evidence to me seems compelling: WP compares very unfavourably to a traditionally produced, peer reviewed-by-specialists reference work. The objections I have received so far are mostly on the lines that my subject is a highly specialized one. Perhaps, but then educational content is educational content, no? Peter Damian (talk) 18:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

That doesn't indicate whether or not Misplaced Pages is getting better, which is the topic of this Talk secton. --Bob K31416 (talk) 19:32, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Well change it so that we look at the articles, using this sampling method, 5, or 10 years ago. In any case, some of the articles in the sample are so bad that it is hard to imagine them having been any worse. The point is to get an appropriate statistical sample. Random selection, which just gives you a lot of weird stubs, is a poor method. Peter Damian (talk) 19:38, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

The main problem I see is scaling up your method. How would you do it for math articles? How about articles on the history of eastern Europe? And then how to make sure that these separate analyses were comparable. Scaling up, of course, is a challenge for any method. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:47, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

It depends what the objective is. If simply to establish that in some areas, WP is not getting better, that would be a start. The WMF has trillions of $ to spend and quality improvement would be a useful place to spend it. If it can be shown that WP needs help in certain places, that would be helpful. Peter Damian (talk) 19:56, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

I made a start. “Abstract and concrete are classifications that denote whether a term describes an object with a physical referent or one with no physical referents.” This opening definition to Abstract and concrete was added on 13:53, 5 July 2013, i.e. comparatively recently. It actually makes no sense. So, Misplaced Pages is not getting better. Peter Damian (talk) 19:51, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

There is much in common between the two exercises. I'm thinking you'd take the same approach to each: Person A picks out two drafts to compare - one being the current version of Misplaced Pages, the other being either an old version or an external competitor. Persons B and C each receive one of the two drafts blindly, not being told where they come from (and implored not to peek!), and are asked to dissect each into a series of separate claims. After they have done this, they exchange the lists of claims and each decides if their own article makes a similar claim as the list they received, and return that yes-or-no feedback to the other party. Now we have a list of claims made by one article, the other, or both. You transmit each claim (including the sources from both articles) separately to a pool of volunteers D who are again blind to the source, who are called on to evaluate whether it is true or false. I picture this more as a scale-of-10 thing than a pass/fail, because it's not always that clear-cut. After each volunteer makes his call, he gets to look over the two articles and decide which presents a true fact more clearly, or checks whether the false statement is really made or was merely misinterpreted. Then somehow you work all that data together into a scoring system. However, that scoring system involves quite some philosophy in its own right! A longer article contains more claims than a shorter one - should it be scored higher? Well, common sense demands it, because if Misplaced Pages articles keep getting longer, that is a sign of progress. Yet an external publisher might have felt compelled to trim articles to fit the length of a book; any author knows it's harder to make writing short than to make it long, yet that indicates negative progress by this metric. A different dimension would be the average number of errors, and a third would be how well-written the same claims are in each article. As a Wikipedian I'm inclined to put the first dimension foremost - we simply want to have an expansive encyclopedia that covers everything, and so long as the error rate is not extraordinarily high, it doesn't matter that much to me if it is 5% or 1%. But others would doggedly define the quality solely in terms of the error rate, however small, without regard to whether we cover a subject in depth or not. Still others want readable text as a high priority, and then again ... readable to who, by what standard? I think the choice of philosophy in this scoring system largely determines, in advance, the outcome of the exercise. Wnt (talk) 21:10, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Action

See below for a table of changes over 10 years to the Action article. My view is that the changes are for the worse. The original article was clearly developed by a professional philosopher. The subsequent additions are confusing, and sometimes distort the flow of the original. For example,"Other events are less clearly defined as actions or not." in the original is a segue to the 'deciding to do ...' list. But the inserted "distractedly drumming ones fingers" is indeed a distraction.

Peter Damian (talk) 20:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Would you please add a third column with the parts which you think got better and worse with the reasons so we can see what you mean? 65.118.77.74 (talk) 23:57, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

Reframing the question

To me the important question is not whether Misplaced Pages is improving (because surely it is), but rather where the asymptote lies. Is Misplaced Pages approaching the level of a high-quality general encyclopedia? When it comes to academic topics, in my view the answer is no. In my own domain of neuroscience at least, we have a few high-quality articles but lots of crappy ones, and over the past five years the situation has hardly changed at all. For what it's worth, I don't view this as meaning that Misplaced Pages is a failure, just that it is not strong in all areas and not likely to be any time soon. Looie496 (talk) 00:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

True. Even if Misplaced Pages has turned the corner and stopped losing net editors, the problem is that the existing number is too small to complete every article on every topic. The phase of exponential growth certainly illustrated that the project could have reached the number needed, but then (in 2007) deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP at the expense of reality intervened. Basically, once Misplaced Pages became a respectable reference for some things, and sites like Google were pushing people toward it, it became something that people all over the world wanted to own, and then the environment became toxic enough to drive people away. So the politics of society choked it off just before it could reach its true potential. Wnt (talk) 00:37, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

This is a legitimate, albeit different question. One can test this, using an appropriate whose design is simple, although the execution isn't trivial. Choose a high quality general encyclopedia, select n articles at random, and see how the quality compares. I believe this is the approach done by some well-know studies comparing WP to EB.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:04, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree that for topics that I already know something about (and thus feel competent to judge), Misplaced Pages has not appreciably improved in the past 5 or 6 years. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 01:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

@Wnt: Please explain how "deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP" hampers the improvement of the crappy neuroscience articles. --NeilN 02:31, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages attracted people when it was a collective project for the common good. When it becomes dominated by arcane wikilegal maneuvers, that drives off volunteers of all stripes. There have been plenty of editors who were doing good editing on technical articles, only to be keelhauled through an administrative proceeding over a small portion of their overall work that ran afoul of some vocal interest. More generally, the intrusion of such conflict turns everything into a fight, and imposes a consistently negative tone. No matter why editors are banned or driven off, their experiences have given Misplaced Pages a terrible reputation that is keeping its numbers of editors down. Why, just today I read another statement about this at Nature News: , "academics often feel too busy to get into some of the admittedly “petty discussions” that sometimes take place around Misplaced Pages edits." I didn't even look for that; it's just one of the sites I commonly page through. Wnt (talk) 13:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

You would be more convincing if you provided solid examples with your general answer to my specific question. Perhaps Sphilbrick can do so. Do you think "deletionism, conflict, political strife, and excessive reverence for BLP" hampers the improvement of the crappy neuroscience articles? --NeilN 14:18, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Since no - one has said it does, the answer is probably "no". 2.96.189.207 (talk) 09:47, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Yet another method

The inclusion of the table and graph above jogged my memory that there is another method currently in use on Misplaced Pages to judge "quality" and coverage in a specific area. I put "quality" in quotes because many people might think the measure doesn't go to the heart of the matter. Rather it measures things like "does a subject we know should have an article, actually have one?" "Does it have a photo?" "Is there more than one source cited?" "Does the talk page have the appropriate project tag?" Not the measure of quality a lot of people might like, but certainly some sort of quality indicator. This "Net Quality Rating" (NQR) Is calculated every week by bot for the entire project (US), by state and by county. It could even be calculated for individual articles, but AFAIK nobody does. By this measure project quality has increased from 33.3% in January 2014 to 44.2% as of yesterday.

The project is WP:NRHP which covers historic buildings and sites listed by the National Register of Historic Places (part of the US Park Service). In total there are 90,000+ sites listed. We have 66,000+ articles (60.9% of sites + county tables + misc). These articles make up well over 1% of the number of articles on en:Misplaced Pages, with many on other language versions as well (e.g. in German where I think they have county tables and articles on about half the sites). Go to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Progress for all the numbers you'd ever want plus a couple more graphs. Go to the article history to see how this has progressed over the last few years.

As I've said, this type of quality measurement is not for everybody, but let me give you a subjective quality assessment for the whole project. There are only 3 or 4 sites on the web that even pretend to give access to info on a large portion of NRHP sites. NRHP focus - the federal government site, Misplaced Pages, and a few commercial sites. The commercial sites, just repackage a government database, summarize a small amount of government text without the help of humans, and update once or twice a year. Not really worth considering IMHO.

The government site has a very clumsy interface, is down much of the time, and if you are lucky will give you access to a bureaucratic, and jargon-filled academic form (the nomination) dated to the time the site was first listed. There's very little updating except for new listings, e.g. if a building burned down you may not be able to tell that from Focus for decades (literally). Most frustrating is that you'll find that for many states you have to go to state websites to get the nomination, but Focus won't even tell you that. The state website are often inferior to Focus. So if a general interest reader who knows the name and location of the site goes to Focus, I'll estimate the following: he or she will spend 15-60 minutes on the site, and get the bureaucratic nomination form about 25% of the time.

If the same general reader, who has a general knowledge of how to navigate in Misplaced Pages, searches here it will take him or her 15-60 seconds to find the site's article, 60% of the time they will find at least a couple of information-packed sentence about the site, and an infobox, sometimes with a direct link to the nomination form (!), sometimes they'll find much, much more. Also, even if the site doesn't have an article, summary info (100% of the time) and a photo (72% of the time) will be available in the county list. If the reader is not familiar with Misplaced Pages navigation it may take them 1- 5 minutes to find all this. In short, for the general reader, Misplaced Pages is head and shoulders better than anything on the internet or anywhere else, for finding information on NRHP sites. And yes, we are improving. More later. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 17:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Please excuse me if I got carried away above. The point is that, either via mechanical methods or via personal impressions, we can evaluate whether Misplaced Pages is improving. In at least the NRHP area, we are.

National Register of Historic Places pages by quality and importance
Importance→ Quality↓	Top	High	Mid	Low	Related	???	Total
FA	1	25	10	45	3	0	84
GA	2	81	64	364	9	0	520
B	10	244	136	889	49	1	1,329
C	11	446	281	2,614	108	3	3,463
Start	9	2,108	1,143	22,272	496	31	26,060
Stub	0	50	699	42,668	463	7	43,887
Total (articles only)	33	2,954	2,333	68,854	1,128	42	75,345
FL	0	3	0	3	0	0	6
List	2	116	2,882	370	65	1	3,452
Unassessed	0	0	0	3	0	6	9
Total	35	3,090	5,239	69,468	1,203	49	80,318

Click here for a bot-updated list (i.e. not real-time) that also includes stats about Category-, Disambig-, File-, Redirect-, Template-, and NA-Class articles.

Can other projects/areas do something similar? Absolutely. The table above can be generated for any individual project AFAIK, so at least some summary measure can be generated from that. WP:NRHP is lucky to have an official list of articles that we should have, but I don't see why other projects couldn't do something similar, e.g. go to the "Encyclopedia of Paleontology" and copy out the names of all articles that should be in Misplaced Pages (likely not a copyright problem), then see how long it takes to get there. Maybe even make a list of all articles that should have illustrations in the area. You might be able to get things like number of references, page length, page views, stub-FA rating for each article from a bot (somebody should be working on this). I'll repeat that I don't like the stub-FA rating very much - it is seldom reviewed and inconsistently applied - but it is a type of quality rating..

The NRHP method above is essentially a census - we try to look at each article. Censuses have their advantages, but in general doing something as complicated as a quality rating can be done about as well in less time with a random sampling method. To answer Bob's question, we don't really need to get a quality rating for all 5,000,000 or so articles. 400 should do it just fine, unless you want to do detailed analyses of specific subject areas. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:57, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

일반 문서 (Ilban munseo)

Korean is a swell language and all, but I'm at a bit of a loss why the Edit Count pages (Example) have the Korean words 일반 문서 (General Documents) instead of "Mainspace" or "Articles" or whatever the former English word was... It has been like this for six months or so, just thought I'd ask... Carrite (talk) 23:47, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I haven't the least clue. At all.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:51, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Answer. Winner 42 Talk to me! 01:31, 10 September 2015 (UTC)