I am sorry to say that I must give Conservapedia a failing grade, on the basis of this survey. Only 5 out of the 10 randomly selected articles was any good. Two more were merely definitions of the term (25 words or less). The rest should be deleted.
If we can get to 90% we call start bragging. So let's do it! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ed Poor (talk)
- Fantastic, Ed tries to conduct a survey to help this site, and Aschlafly finds a way to minimize the importance of the survey and throw out baseless arguments. Concise does not necessarily mean short. Me thinks Andy is confusing an encyclopedia with a dictionary. ColinRtalk 13:55, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
Biblical criticism
Was it copied from CreationWiki?
Probably not, but, darn it all, TerryH should have clearly indicated its provenance on Talk:Biblical cricicism, currently a nonexistent page. Even if it is 100% valid, which I'm guessing it is, without a statement of origin and authorship this article has a quality problem in my opinion.
The CreationWiki article is the work of exactly two contributors, Tsommer and Temlakos. The Conservapedia article is by TerryH. The Conservapedia article is almost identical to the last revision by Temlakos and does not seem to include recent changes by Tsommer, so very likely TerryH is Temlakos and this is a dual submission. Dpbsmith 14:18, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
I question the methodology of the study
How were the "random" articles choosen? Random page link? If I preform the same thing, with say 20 random page links I get a WHOLE lot of rubbish, nothing approaching 50 percent "good" I think this wasn't truly random. Etaroced 21:07, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- Try doing the same on Wikipedia. It's incredible to me how much junk appears.--Aschlafly 23:10, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- i tried that on wikipedia just now and out of ten random articles, all but 3 were entertainment related articles. none were any goodBohdan
- That's similar to my results on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is really just a traffic-generator and little more.--Aschlafly 23:40, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
Don't think that random pages should be used to evaluate either place. To really evaluate the quality of the pages, i would propose that we take a random number of articles from some welknown encyclopedia and then make side by side comparison on how Wikipedia and Conservapedia cover those topics. As Wikipedia has been around for much longer and the goal is to measure the quality of the entries not quantity, i would be willing to discard those articles one cant find from Conservapedia. This would still ofc be an subjective view, but step for the better i think. (And yes, one can argue that to some degree quantity is allso an measure on how good an encyclopedia is) Timppeli 23:52, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
Another criteria
Number of links to the page, number of links in the page. Part of the essence of the wiki is the interconnected nature of the material. A page with no links that isn't linked from anywhere is poor compared to one that has links.
Given this, my survey:
John Curtin
19 words, 1 link out, no links in
Fargo
119 words, 6 links out, 1 link in
Vortigern
221 words, 9 links out, 2 links in
Scottish National Party
25 words, 4 links out, 3 links in
Infrared radiation
31 words, 2 links out, 1 link in
Ernest Hemingway
151 words, 10 links out, 3 links in + 2 "... Terms"
Immigration
141 words, 3 links out, 7 links in
Howard Stern
1695 words, 12 links out (+3 external), 1 link in
Microeconomics Terms F
2 words, 1 link out (+25 other terms), 26 links in (all from other terms)
Unferth
28 words, 3 links out, 1 link in
---
Given this, the only article that was reasonable in terms of content was Howard Stern. However, this article had very few links to other articles and had only one thing linking back in. Arguably, none of the other articles had anything that would be usable for a student or teacher trying to use this site as a reference. Trivial other sources (a hard copy dictionary for example) do a better job at defining the other words.
Articles being written today other than the 'hot ones' are poor at linking to other articles - even with ones that exist. If this is to become a site where people go to find out information, it needs information and it needs to have more connectivity between articles than an occasional see also or link off the site. --Mtur 16:17, 25 April 2007 (EDT)