Military history, cricket, and Australia targeted in Wikipedia articles' popularity vs. quality; how copyright damages economy

Recent research

Military history, cricket, and Australia targeted in Wikipedia articles' popularity vs. quality; how copyright damages economy

Popularity does not breed quality (and vice versa)

This paper^[1] provides evidence that quality of an article is not a simple function of its popularity, or, in the words of the authors, that there is "extensive misalignment between production and consumption" in peer communities such as Wikipedia. As the author notes, reader demand for some topics (e.g. LGBT topics or pages about countries) is poorly satisfied, whereas there is over-abundance of quality on topics of comparatively little interest, such as military history.

Rank	Popular and underdeveloped topics	High-quality, not popular topics
1	Countries	Cricket
2	Pop music	Tropical cyclones
3	Internet	Middle Ages
4	Comedy	Politics
5	Technology	Fungi
6	Religion	Birds
7	Science fiction	Military history
8	Rock music	Ships
9	Psychology	England
10	LGBT studies	Australia

The authors arrived at this conclusion by comparing data on page views to articles on English, French, Russian, and Portuguese Wikipedias to their respective Wikipedia:Assessment (and like) quality ratings. The authors note that at most 10% of Wikipedia articles are well correlated with regards to their quality and popularity; in turn over 50% of high quality articles concern topics of relatively little demand (as measured by their page views). The authors estimate that about half of the page views on Wikipedia – billions each month – are directed towards articles that should be of better quality, if it was just their popularity that would translate directly into quality. The authors identify 4,135 articles that are of high interest but poor quality, and suggest that the Wikipedia community may want to focus on improving such topics. Among specific examples of extremes are articles with poor quality (start class) and high number of views such as wedding (1k views each day) or cisgender (2.5k views each day). For examples of topics of high quality and little impact, well, one just needs to glance at a random topic in the Wikipedia:Featured articles – the authors use the example of 10 Featured Articles about the members of the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (itself a Good Article; 30 views per day). Interestingly, based on their study of WikiProjects, popularity and quality, the authors find that contrary to some popular claims, pop culture topics are also among those that are underdeveloped. The authors also note that even within WikiProjects, the labor is not efficiently organized: for example, within the topic of military history, there are numerous featured articles about individual naval ships, but the topics of broader and more popular interests, such as about NATO, are less well attended to. In conclusion, the authors encourage the Wikipedia community to focus on such topics, and to recruit participants for improvement drives using tools such as User:SuggestBot.

Excessive copyright terms proven to be a cost for society, via English Wikipedia images

Within a sample of US bestseller authors, what effect may the addition of this image to the article Michael Gold have had on its traffic?

Paul J. Heald and his coauthors at the University of Glasgow continued their extremely valuable studies of the public domain, publishing "The Valuation of Unprotected Works".^[2] The study finds that "massive social harm was done by the most recent copyright term extension that has prevented millions of works from falling into the public domain since 1998" which "provides strong justification for the enactment of orphan works legislation."

Context

In recent years, authorities have started acknowledging possible errors in copyright legislation of the past, which would have been prevented by an evidence-based approach. Heald mentions the Hargreaves Report (2011), endorsed by the UK's IP office, but other examples can be found in World Intellectual Property Organization reports. This awakening corresponds to the work by researchers and think tanks to prove the importance of public domain and certain damages of copyright.^{[supp 1]}

The importance of evidence-based legislation can't be overstated, especially in the current process of EU copyright revision.

As Heald notes, past copyright policy has relied on a number of incorrect assumptions, in short:

that private value equates with social welfare; that is, any payment associated to copyright makes society richer;
that only private value is generated by sales under copyright monopoly;
that absence of copyright reduces both distribution and associated payments.

Recent studies, some of which are mentioned in this paper (Pollock, Waldfogel, Heald), have instead found strong indicators that:

consumer surplus (i.e. amounts saved by consumers) can be higher and hence contribute more to social welfare;
absence of copyright may produce higher private value as well;
works under traditional copyright, especially given the phenomenon of orphan works, don't manage to cover the entire market, resulting in a loss of knowledge distribution as well as of potential sales.

In short, it seems that "the public is better off when a work becomes freely available", insofar as copyright has been "robust enough to stimulate the creation of the work in the first place" and that a work "must remain available to the public after it falls into the public domain".

Findings

However, it is impossible to measure the value of knowledge acquired by society and, even considering the mere monetary value, it is impossible to measure transactions which did not happen. The English Wikipedia is used by the authors as dataset because its history is open to inspection and its content is unencumbered by copyright payments, so every "transaction" is public.

In particular, the study measures what would be the cost of gratis images not being available for use on English Wikipedia articles, as a proxy of (i) the consumer surplus generated by those images, (ii) their private value, and (iii) their contribution to social welfare. If a positive value is found, it is proved that a more restrictive copyright would be harmful, and we can reasonably infer that reducing copyright restrictions would make society richer.

The calculation is done in three passages.

362 authors of New York Times bestsellers of 1895–1969 are considered. Their English Wikipedia articles are checked for inclusion of portraits and copyright status thereof; the increase in page views caused by the presence of the image is calculated. To depurate other factors, authors are compared in "matched pairs" of similar popularity as suggested by Amazon review or pageviews in mid 2009. Only the lowest scoring months are considered, the general increase in pageviews is discounted, etc.
- The first proxy considered is how much it would cost to buy the images from traditional image sellers, in the hypothetical (and absurd) case that article authors were allowed to. Such an image typically costs around US$100 even if it is in the public domain or identical to the one used by our articles.
- The second proxy is how much the added pageviews are worth in terms of potential advertising revenue ($0.53 cents/view, according to [1]).
The values are then validated on a different dataset, some hundreds composers and lyricists.
The amounts are then expanded proportionally to all English Wikipedia articles by considering images and pageviews of a sample of 300 articles.

Clearly, the number of inferences is great, but the authors believe the findings to be robust. The pageview increase, depending on the method, was 6%, 17% or 19%, and at any rate positive. Authors with most images were those died before 1880, an outcome which has no possible technological reason nor any welfare justification: it's clearly a distortion produced by copyright.

For those fond of price tags, the English Wikipedia images were esteemed to be worth about $30,000/year for those 362 writers, or about $30m in hypothetical advertising revenue for English Wikipedia, or $200m–230m in hypothetical costs of image purchase.

At any rate, this reviewer thinks that the positive impact of the lack of copyright royalties is proven and confirms the authors' thesis. It is quite challenging to extend the finding to the whole English Wikipedia, all Wikimedia projects, the entire free knowledge landscape and finally the overall cultural works market; and even more fragile to put a price tag on it. However, this kind of one-number communication device is widely used to explain the impact of legislation and numbers traditionally used by legislators are way more fragile than this. Moreover, the study makes it possible to prove a positive impact on important literature authors and their life, i.e. their reputation, which is supposed to be the aim of copyright laws, while financial transactions are only means.

Methodological nitpicks

There are several possible observations to be made about details of the study.

Only few hundreds articles were considered, and only on the English Wikipedia. Measuring pageviews is not explained in detail, but it clearly relied on stats.grok.se, on whose limitations see the stats.grok.se FAQ and m:Research:Page view.
Special:Random is not able to produce a representative set of the English Wikipedia, let alone of the whole Wikipedia. In fact, it relies on a pseudo-random method which is not very random. (A more random method, based on ElasticSearch, was briefly enabled but then disabled for performance reasons.)
The author uses an artificial definition of "public domain" to match the cases which the study was able to measure, i.e. gratis images. Only 67% of the images were in the public domain while 13% were in fair use and 19% released in some way by the author. As for the releases by the authors, all cases are confusingly conflated: in particular "a Creative Commons" and "unprotected" are two incorrect terms used, which fail to recognise that CC images are copyrighted works and that not all CC images are free cultural works. This mix makes it hard to extend the results to the public domain proper, i.e. the works without any copyright protection, as well as to Wikimedia projects other than the English Wikipedia where fair use is less common. This may not affect the result on the welfare impact for the English Wikipedia but has a higher impact on the dates: namely, the fact that people who died before 2000 have less images may just mean that the English Wikipedia rules allowed fair use more for them because Wikipedia photographers would not be able to shoot photos themselves.
Again on terminology, it is disappointing that Wikipedia's article authors are called "page builders", as if they were mechanical workers (with all due respect for mechanical workers). There is no reason to reserve the term "authors" to the professional writers who are the subjects of those articles. An artificial restriction of the pool of people who can assert to be "authors" is one of the main propaganda tools of the "pro-copyright" lobby.

Briefly

"Automatic text summarization of Wikipedia articles":^[3] The authors built neural networks using different features to pick sentences to summarize (English?) Wikipedia articles. They compared their results to Microsoft Word 2007 and found out results are very different.

Relationship between Google searches and Wikipedia edits:^[4] A student course paper developed a model to find a correlation between the number of searches on Google resulting from an increased public interest in a subject, and the number of edits made to that subject’s corresponding Wikipedia page. Google Trends data from 2012 for “Barack Obama”, “Google“ and “Mathematics” was compared with Wikipedia page revisions of the corresponding articles within the same period. Instead of the actual data, which was unavailable, the paper applied approximation techniques to estimate the number of Google searches and the number of Wikipedia edits during a given period. Except for a few instances of spikes matching up, no clear correlation between Google searches and Wikipedia edits was found. Similar results were observed when more graphs were generated for different topics. The model made no provision for disproving the existence of a correlation. These limitations render the results of the study still inconclusive.
How much of the Amazon rainforest would it take to print out Wikipedia?:^[5] Two students at the University of Leicester have produced a thought-provoking mathematical illustration of the scope of the Internet by calculating how much of the Amazon rainforest would be consumed if the entire Internet were printed on standard A4-size sheets of paper. Their conclusion is about 2% for the entire Internet, and 2.1 × 10⁻⁶% for the English Wikipedia, the size of which they used to extrapolate the size of the rest of the Internet. Their calculations are based on a random sample of only ten pages, the average size of which they multiplied by the number of Wikipedia articles, which at the time was 4.7 million. Given the wealth of quantitative data available about Wikipedia, and that Wikipedia articles vastly range in size from a sentence or two up to the 784K byte article List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States, perhaps more accurate estimates could have been made.
Perceptions of bot services: This study^[6] looked at how Wikipedians perceive bots, to enhance our understanding of the relationship between human and bot editors. The authors find that the bots are perceived as either "servants" or "policemen". Overall, the bots are well accepted by the community, a factor the authors attribute to the fact that most bots are clearly labelled as and seen as extensions of human actors (tools used by advanced Wikipedians). The authors nonetheless observe that where bots make large number of minor edits, they are most likely to attract criticism. Still, the necessity for such labor, maintaining categories, templates and such, is, according to actors, a widely recognized and accepted element of Wikipedia's life.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

"P2Pedia: a peer-to-peer wiki for decentralized collaboration"^[7] (screencast demo; see also User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals)
'"Distributed wikis: a survey"^[8] From the abstract: "We identify three classes of distributed wiki systems, each using a different collaboration model and distribution scheme for its pages: highly available wikis, decentralized social wikis and federated wikis."
"Detection speculations using active learning" ("Deteccion de Especulaciones utilizando Active Learning")^[9](student thesis in Spanish, about the detection of weasel words on the English Wikipedia)

References

^ Morten Warncke-Wang; Vivek Ranjan; Loren Terveen & Brent Hecht (2015). "Misalignment Between Supply and Demand of Quality Content in Peer Production Communities" (PDF). Pre-print PDF, to appear in the Proceedings of the The 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).
^ Heald, Paul J. and Erickson, Kris and Kretschmer, Martin, "The Valuation of Unprotected Works: A Case Study of Public Domain Photographs on Wikipedia" (February 4, 2015). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2560572 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2560572
^ Hingu, Dharmendra; Shah, Deep; Udmale, Sandeep S. (January 2015). "Automatic text summarization of Wikipedia articles". 2015 International Conference on Communication, Information Computing Technology (ICCICT). 2015 International Conference on Communication, Information Computing Technology (ICCICT). doi:10.1109/ICCICT.2015.7045732.
^ Claire, Charron (2014). "Analysing Trends Between US Google Searches and English Wikipedia Page Edits" (PDF). Retrieved 26 April 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Harwood, George; Walker, Evangeline (2015). "How Much of the Amazon Would it Take to Print the Internet?". Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics. 4. Centre for Interdisciplinary Science, University of Leicester.
^ Clément, Maxime; Guitton, Matthieu J. (September 2015). "Interacting with bots online: Users' reactions to actions of automated programs in Wikipedia". Computers in Human Behavior. 50: 66–75. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.03.078. ISSN 0747-5632.
^ Davoust, Alan; Alexander Craig; Babak Esfandiari; Vincent Kazmierski (2014-10-01). "P2Pedia: a peer-to-peer wiki for decentralized collaboration". Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 27 (11): 2778–2795. doi:10.1002/cpe.3420. ISSN 1532-0634. S2CID 35114840.
^ Davoust, Alan; Hala Skaf-Molli; Pascal Molli; Babak Esfandiari; Khaled Aslan (2014-11-01). "Distributed wikis: a survey" (PDF). Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 27 (11): â€“. doi:10.1002/cpe.3439. ISSN 1532-0634. S2CID 45142475.
^ Benjamín Machíın Serna: "Deteccion de Especulaciones utilizando Active Learning". Student thesis, Universidad de la República – Uruguay, 2013 PDF)

Supplementary references and notes:

^ The most important of these initiatives is probably the 2009 Public Domain Manifesto. Some examples in the context of orphan works: m:Italian cultural heritage on the Wikimedia projects#Advocating for the public domain bibliography commented in an Italian paper by this reviewer. http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.6675

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29 April 2015 (all comments)

Wikimania

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I haven't read the first paper yet, but I think two factors might explain some of it. Perhaps editors feel that it is easier, more manageable, and less intimidating to tackle a smaller-scale subject, such as the SS Minnow, as opposed to an article covering an extremely broad topic like the entire US Navy. Also, perhaps editors mistakenly assume that these broad topics are already well covered by the encyclopedia. Gamaliel (talk) 02:47, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Your first factor is by far the most important. This problem has been discussed many times on WP, perhaps most extensively in this huge thread at the FAC talk page in 2011, and this same answer comes up again and again. Covering a very broad topic comprehensively is orders of magnitude more difficult than covering a small one. In writing articles on ancient Egypt, I've covered a couple of small topics and a couple of fairly broad ones. There is a major difference in difficulty between the two, even though I'm drawing my information from a fairly small and insular field of scholarship dealing with a single ancient culture. The amount of work that would be involved in thoroughly researching a universal topic like mythology, house, or brain boggles the mind. A. Parrot (talk) 04:40, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree; even in well-developed but niche fields the same result plays out- video games has 1100 GAs, FAs, and FLs, but can't get basic articles about the history of the subject to an acceptable quality despite extensive appeals. It's 1/100th of the work to write a good article about your local lake than about the sea. --Pres N 04:59, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to say, A. Parrot, this study brings to mind the much-maligned TCO study from 2011. Perhaps he shouldn't have been so demonized for it. And yes, PresN, the authors of this study completely miss how much more difficult it is to write a top-level article. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:56, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's one of those things we contributors have passively known for a long time, quite honestly I'm always a little amused when research rediscovers the fact. And TCO's report indeed deserved better. ResMar 06:53, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

TCO's study was spot-on, and I think people recognized that to an extent at the time, but a lot of people took issue with his... tone, and word choice. FAC has some people with egos, and several people were already annoyed at him at the time for long-winded rambles without him labeling editors with words they found pejorative. --Pres N 17:21, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@The ed17: I've only skimmed User:TCO's study so far, but it seems spot on. I'd love to hear more about the objections, specifically any of substance. I assume there was a lot of knee-jerk objections to the idea that people's preferred topics were "unimportant", relatively speaking? Gamaliel (talk) 17:10, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Gamaliel: The initial discussion was here, though references to it pop up for months afterwards in the archives. Basically, TCO had already angered quite a few people with diatribes against the way the FAC process was run that people interpreted as attacks against them, and they reall, really didn't like the bit in the middle where he split the FAC nominators into 4 groups (via a graph) labelled "Champions", "Battleships", "Dabblers", and "Star Collectors", based on how many FAs they had crossed with the average monthly page views of those FACs. Given how many FAC regulars write FAs on "niche" topics... And yeah, TCO was pretty clear that he felt that those people were wasting their time and should be focusing more on high-pageview topics. --Pres N 17:31, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I must say I had a lot of sympathy for those complaints, even though I got labeled a "champion" in that study. Slapping those labels on people based on the FA nominations from a small stretch of time was pretty unfair. User:Ealdgyth got labelled a "star collector", but what's she done since then? William the Conqueror, Norman conquest of England, and Middle Ages! The push for more coverage of core topics may have motivated her—you'd have to ask her—but maybe she just felt finally prepared to tackle those colossal topics. I know that my desire and preparation to write on the topic are pretty much the only things that govern when I write what I write. And there is something to be said for the coverage of obscure topics; they may have only obscure sources that are hidden away in inaccessible libraries, and if one Wikipedian lays hand on those sources and writes an article based on them, the information becomes accessible worldwide at a stroke. Finally, I don't remember TCO offering very specific ideas for how to address the problem, and he got embroiled in an even bigger wikipolitical blowup at the FA project in early 2012, so it was easy to write him off as a disruptive noisemaker rather than somebody offering constructive solutions. I'm not saying he was wrong, just that he could have gone about making his points better than he did. A. Parrot (talk) 18:51, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The labels were pretty unfairly applied- I got Battleship, because I had a video game FA with a high pageview count dragging me up, but I've also written one that gets ~1500/month, and GAs that get single-digits per day. The takeaway that we incentivize small, niche articles over large, difficult articles was and is true, but the editor analysis wasn't very helpful. --Pres N 18:59, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I can't say that TCO's "study" (I say that in quotes as the data was not a problem, and actually interesting, but the labeling of people with pejorative labels made it pretty clear that the goal of the study was to get people's goat) had much to do with my spate of editing "large scale" topics - it was much more a combination of me having time for wikipedia and being involved in the wikicup where there was a significant multiplier for articles that had lots of interwiki links. I've not managed it again because my time for wikipedia has been much more limited. And, to be honest, the aftermath of sockpuppetry and hell I took for bringing Middle Ages up to a higher standard isn't exactly a motivator for doing such a topic again. (It's there in the archives of the talk page... ). I've always thought, along with Iridescent, that obscure topics are where Wikipedia shines - as topics such as Urse d'Abetot, William of Wrotham, or Roger Norreis are often the best coverage of the topic available outside of some obscure specialist publications. It's easy to find information on United States in lots of places - but Monroe Edwards? That's a different story. I suspect most of the people reading our "high level" articles are not actually reading them but just looking for a quick fact or two. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:30, 6 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That's pretty much what I thought, but I didn't want to stalk about your motivations when I wasn't sure. You're probably right about how most high-traffic articles are used, but I'd argue there are some articles on subjects that are broad and attract people—but it's not easy to find good information about them because the sources that analyze them in depth are specialized and scholarly. Nearly everything in my chosen topic area of ancient Egyptian religion, with a few possible exceptions like ancient Egyptian burial customs, fits that description. Take ancient Egyptian deities#Characteristics. People may know several fragments of Egyptian myths, but they don't know that the gods are more like symbols than like actual characters, that Egyptian myths are more like metaphors than like legends, or that Egyptian gods are immortal because they die over and over. My huge public library only contains one or two books that discuss those kinds of things in reasonable depth. Lots of ancient religions are like that. There must be lots of other subjects out there that I'm less familiar with that are both popular and difficult to get good information on. A. Parrot (talk) 00:08, 7 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

So, Comedy and Science Fiction topics are underdeveloped, while Politics and Birds are High-quality ... and this is a problem? Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 04:36, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Aside from the self-interest (gobble) angle, I agree. There's lots of great articles on the US Navy already, like the US Navy's. I see the Wiki being far, far more important for less covered topic, where there are few places this information can be collected and presented, for free. Is it a problem that the US Navy article could be better, or super-fantastic that the article on the Ferranti Sirius exists at all? I think the later, and that people are missing the forest for the trees. Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:24, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly—it's the long tail nature of Wikipedia that brought me here in the first place, and that kept me coming back for years before I started contributing seriously. And it's not like the "popular" articles don't get any love—they get knocked out at a slow pace, but people do get to them. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 11:36, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And pop culture will generally always be easier to write good articles for, given generally easy to find sources and a higher number of potential contributors interested in them, so I'm never that worried (downside: pop culture attracts more trolls, vandals, and bad edits.) I've always disliked the "eww we have articles on X show but not subject Y" because it's really trying to make information into "highbrow" or "lowbrow" and devalue the work of contributors. We should always be encouraging quality edits, whether you only care about Sponge Bob or whether you love obscure dinosaur taxonomy. The readers who are looking for that information are going to appreciate the effort either way. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 13:50, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think there could be a lot of value in finding ways to help editors tackle the larger topics. It took me 5 years to write Texas Revolution - much easier to write articles on the individual battles and people involved. I agree with Maury Markowitz, though, that part of the appeal of Wikipedia is that it contains information on topics that is not found anywhere else online. We're bringing light to topics that might be underrepresented, and that is powerful. We need to find a good balance between those competing principles - it's great that the studies are pointing out the imbalance, but we need suggestions on ways to improve the first part, rather than decrease the second. Karanacs (talk) 14:10, 1 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

One of those cricket FAs in the topic mentioned is Donald Bradman. That isn't so very unpopular - it typically gets 500-1000 views a day, which ain't bad for an article about a sportsman who retired 50 years ago. --Dweller (talk) 09:23, 5 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That is right and, given that cricket is the world's second most popular sport after football, it hardly belongs in a column headed "unpopular". I think the authors of the survey need to apply some real world thinking about the typical WP editor. This person is not a professional and so cannot be regimented into developing articles which they believe to be important. Instead, he uses his gifted amateurism to develop those articles in which he is interested. His involvement in a project is not based on any desire to promote the project, or to work in some organised fashion within it, but rather on the project as a forum in which to share views with and, sometimes, assist other editors with a mutual interest. The articles about the 1948 Australian cricket team, mentioned above, were a collaborative effort which I would not expect to see repeated often if at all. Obviously, we would all like to see quality and, yes, there are far too many stubs and starts but, given the volume of articles already started and the volume of potential articles in what is after all an encyclopaedia, what can you realistically expect? Jack | ^{talk page} 10:50, 5 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi everyone, and apologies for being late to the party! In case you don't know, I'm the first author on the paper about popularity/quality. Thank you all for a very interesting discussion, I have jotted down notes from it once already, and will re-read it and write down more notes. The links to previous discussions along these lines are also very helpful, although I haven't yet had the time to read all of them (some of them are quite large). Let me comment on a few specific things, before I go dish out actual thanks to everyone. I'll be adding this talk page to my watchlist in case there are follow-up questions, and I welcome questions or comments on my talk page as well, of course, and I can be emailed if you want to reach me off-wiki.

Gamaliel brings up an important point with regards to why these general subjects don't have FAs (size of the topic), and Karanacs' work on Texas Revolution is a good example (massive kudos for that effort!) We think along the same lines in the paper, although perhaps not at clearly. Figuring out why something occurs was outside the scope of this paper (it's analytical, we try to describe what the world looks like, so to speak), but as I continue my research I am interested in building tools to support contributors who are interested in working on these types of articles, and then those types of issues are of course very important.

Maury Markowitz and Curly Turkey mentioned the long tail, and Jack mentioned contributors choosing from self-interest. The latter is part of our motivation for studying this and something we point to several times in the paper, we wanted to know more about how that type of work selection affects systems like Wikipedia. When it comes to the long tail, it's typically not a "problem" in the popularity context. In all four languages we studied the majority of articles are stub/start quality and they do not get a lot of views, so there is no issue there. It's also clear that because Wikipedia's contributors are volunteers, they're free to leave, and therefore a central decision process on what to work on us unlikely to happen (we discuss this in the paper). Yet, I'm thinking that it would be great if we could figure out a way to serve high-quality content to a larger portion of Wikipedia's audience, which as Karanacs pointed out doesn't mean I'd want to decrease other parts.

Lastly, a technical detail: cricket is, as Dweller and Jack point out, not an unpopular topic. In our paper we were interested in understanding what topics are in the two extremes: highly-popular non-FAs, and FAs that aren't particularly popular. In the latter group, the relative risk of encountering an article from WikiProject Cricket is very high, which is why that project made our list. In other words, we didn't try to define the entirety of topics as popular/not-popular, we instead looked at specific subsets of articles to understand more about them.

Thanks again for the comments, everyone, and please do ask if you have questions! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 22:33, 5 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think one of the single best ways to get more people interested in the topics with bigger scope is to provide a better way for editors to find willing collaborators. Texas Revolution would still be a miserable shell if I hadn't been specifically invited by another editor to help with the article - after the History Channel approached the WMF to see if there was any chance the article could be featured. (The deadline and external motivation was also helpful.) Collaborations may the larger articles soooo much easier to write. As it stands, the only way to find them is to either know that someone is interested in a topic and approach them directly, post on a Wikiproject (largely defunct) or article talk page, or randomly run across kindred spirits (as has happened to me too). Karanacs (talk) 00:27, 6 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've worked on some FAs that were extremely popular, and some that were quite obscure. For me, working on the obscure ones has been a far more enjoyable process. It's not because the popular articles are intimidating (although the idea of bringing United States to FA, for example, does seem overwhelming) but because they attract more editors' attention, which forces me to collaborate. Sometimes, the collaboration is productive and enjoyable -- such as when Wehwalt and I worked on James A. Garfield recently. But when the other editors are POV-pushers, edit-warriors, and talk-page-filibusterers, the process quickly becomes unpleasant. Take a look at Talk:Thomas Jefferson, for example. A nightmare. That article should have been promoted to FA years ago. There are plenty of reliable sources and plenty of interested editors. But in a volunteer project, there's only so much aggravation an editor is willing to put up with before walking away. That, I think, is one of the biggest impediment to getting vital articles to FA or GA. I'm not sure what the solution is. --Coemgenus (talk) 12:47, 6 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We have no real, binding means of resolving content disputes. An RfC may hold for a while, but a new one can be opened up, so the arguments never stop. And even when a few editors make a concerted effort to improve an article, their improvements may not stick because of continued interference (see Ealdgyth's comments above about the disputes at Talk:Middle Ages). Wikipedians generally adhere to the principles that no one owns anything and that articles can always be improved. As a result, Wikipedia provides no way to stop the barrage of complaints. Of course no article is perfect, but what too many Wikipedians won't admit is that once an article's been improved to a certain level, efforts to change the article are more likely to be detrimental (by pushing ill-informed or biased ideas, or simply by aggravating the editors who actually understand the subject) than they are to be helpful. Most of the time I've been lucky enough to escape this phenomenon, but I've seen it happen over and over to other people. A. Parrot (talk) 00:08, 7 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again for great comments! Based on the previous threads, I figured that collaboration would be a key part of working on some of these broader topic articles, and learning about your experiences (particularly with some links to discussions so I can go check them out for myself) is very helpful. I'll definitely be keeping this in mind as I continue my research in this area. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:26, 10 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See also this discussion on Twitter with another one of the paper's authors. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 05:16, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I think the writers of the first paper should take a look at Featured Topics; concentrated, long-term contributions in what are frequently very specialist areas. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:12, 8 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- Oh, very interesting, thanks for pointing that out to me! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:26, 10 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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