Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-04-23/News and notes

News and notes

Unreferenced biographies under scrutiny

After continued concerns about the dismal quality of certain unreferenced articles about living people, Messedrocker has compiled, through an analysis of article categories, a list of over 16,000 articles on living persons that do not completely cite their sources. The list is divided into 17 sub-pages; users are encouraged to review uncited statements, attempt to find sources or remove uncited, controversial statements, and correctly tag articles.

Wikipedia user studies continue

The WikiProject Vandalism studies recently finished its first study and has published its conclusions (a full and detailed copy can be found here).

The first study analyzed a randomly sampled pool of 100 random articles. Within these 100 articles there were a total of 668 edits during the months of November 2004, 2005, and 2006. Of those 668 edits, 31 (or 4.64%) were a vandalism of some type. The study's salient findings suggest that in a given month approximately 5% of edits are vandalism and 97% of that vandalism is done by anonymous editors. Obvious vandalism is the vast majority of vandalism used. From the data gathered within this study it is also found that roughly 25% of vandalism reverting is done by anonymous editors and roughly 75% is done by wikipedians with user accounts. The mean average time vandalism reverting is 758.35 minutes (12.63 hours), a figure that may be skewed by outliers. The median time vandalism reverting is 14 minutes.

The planned second study is in a developmental stage; details relating to the study, which will involve a larger sample size, are being planned.

Meanwhile, one of the few user surveys of Wikipedians, conducted in 2005 and originally available only in German, was translated into English recently.

Briefly

Jimbo Wales attended a wikimeetup on Monday, 23 April in Adelaide, South Australia and another one in Perth, Western Australia on Tuesday, 24 April. Upcoming wikimeetups include a Wednesday, April 25 meetup in Sydney, and a Friday, April 27 meetup in Melbourne. Jimbo is also expected to be in attendance at these meetups.
Wii demolished a record for edits on a Main Page featured article on 18 April, with 667 edits over the 24 hours that it was linked to; the previous record belonged to The Lord of the Rings, which received 453 edits on 5 October, 2006.
The Friulian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 3,000 users.
The French Wikinews has reached 1,000 users.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 36,000 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 75,000 edits.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 9,000,000 edits.
The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 edits.