Understanding the ‘quality motion’ of wikipedia articles through semantic convergence analysis

Abstract

To better inform the users of the articles quality, Wikipedia assigns quality labels to the articles. While most of the existing studies of the Wikipedia phenomenon took the quality ratings provided by Wikipedia as the outcome variable of their research, a few yet growing number of studies ask expert raters to rate the quality of selected Wikipedia articles because of their doubts in Wikipedia’s ratings. This study aims to check if Wikipedia’s ratings really reflect its stated criteria. According to Wikipedia criteria, having abundant and stable content is the key to article’s quality promotion; we therefore examine the content change in terms of quantity change and content stability by showing the semantic convergence. We found out that the quantity of content change is significant in the promoted articles, which complies with Wikipedia’s stated criteria.