Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-08-01/Featured content

Outside sources monitoring featured articles

Observers following the featured article process have recently found it a useful academic research subject, and the featured articles have garnered some outside publicity as well. There were also 5 new admins, 11 new featured articles, 2 new featured lists, and 5 new featured pictures this week.

Featured article IQ

A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles — in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" — when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages.

According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging.

Norman Borlaug

It seems that the selection of featured articles for the Main Page is becoming a matter of interest for people outside Wikipedia as well. Norman Borlaug was the featured article chosen for display on the Main Page for Wednesday, 27 July. In anticipation of this, the scheduled appearance was mentioned on a website that apparently is run by an American farmers' advocacy group.