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Wikipedia Now Crowd-Sourcing Article Ratings

Categories:

Engagement & Collaboration, Social Media & Information Technology

May 16, 2011

by Gideon Rosenblatt

The Wikipedia community is well aware of the criticisms of its reliability. So that’s why I was so interested today to stumble on a relatively new article rating system within Wikipedia.

You can see it in action on the Dan Gillmor page, and here’s a close-up shot of the ratings:

Crowd-sourcing the ratings too

 

First word of this move toward article ratings in Wikipedia came back in September of last year, but it looks like it’s just now starting to roll out, slowly but surely on actual articles now. The Gillmor article is the only one I’ve seen it on so far.

The crowd-sourced encyclopedia is now crowd-sourcing its own evaluation. Makes perfect sense. Trustworthy, objective, complete and well-written. These seem like great measures for this very important container of our collective intelligence. Do you think they’re missing anything important, or did they get it right?

P.S. – Looks like there’s already some conversation on Wikipedia about the relative merits of this new feature. One of the posts says this new feature is now on 100,000 Wikipedia pages.

  • http://www.crowdsourcing.org Tonya van Dijk

    Another crowdsourcing initiative from Wikipedia, another role that the public can take part of. Although many have criticized Wikipedia, for sure this initiative of asking the public to evaluate their web pages will help them reach their goal by 2015. To know what their goal is, read more at http://crowdsourcing.org/l/479.

  • http://www.twitter.com/cypherinfo cypherinfo

    The rating is itself the proof of the wikipedia’s administrators awareness of not to be objectives on article content; I’m talking about Italian wikipedia that convey a feeling of fascist culture protection but some articles!

  • Owen4004

    this is a good new feature for wikipedia :)

    • http://www.alchemyofchange.net/ Gideon Rosenblatt

      Agreed. And it now seems to be showing up in a lot more articles than when I originally posted this.

  • Anonymous

    On a related note this site uses crowd-sourcing as well for content accuracy:
    http://motivist.com/main/index/

    • http://www.alchemyofchange.net/ Gideon Rosenblatt

      Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Looks like building critical mass of input is still the challenge. Interesting idea though.

  • Gallery FleurDeLis

    Amazing. I first saw this on the wikipedia for Josignacio. But the reliability of these page ratings will be determined largely when there is enough ratings for it to be trustworthy. Also, when I searched Pablo Picasso I saw that he has only about 40 ratings so far. Why is there so few people who want to rate articles? Nevertheless, this feature seems to be an amazing way to self manage the community from poorly written articles.

  • mathews

    searched the word Gideon and was totally inadequate

  • Worms2u

    The rating options are very poorly structured. Trustworthy? An article can cite lots of trustworthy sources but do so very poorly. It can list them without seriously using or understanding them. Objective? It’s easy to be fair but stupid. Complete? OK, this one at least makes some sense in terms of rating options. Well-written (=well organized and well-written)? Again, something can be well-written (good grammar, even engaging) and still be riddled with lack of actual comprehension or even errors.