Size matters: word count as a measure of quality on wikipedia

Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia", now contains over two million English articles, and is widely regarded as a highquality, authoritative encyclopedia. Some Wikipedia articles, however, are of questionable quality, and it is not always apparent to the visitor which articles are good and which are bad. We propose a simple metric ? word count ? for measuring article quality. In spite of its striking simplicity, we show that this metric significantly outperforms the more complex methods described in related work. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.3 [Information Interfaces]: Group and Organization Interfaces? Collaborative computing; I.2.7 [Artificial Intelligence]: Natural Language Processing? Text analysis. General Terms: Measurement, algorithms.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Joshua E. Blumenstock
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Natural Language Processing, Simple Metric, Striking Simplicity, WWW 2008