Wikipedia:External peer review/UIUC 2005

Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia (Fall 2005)

 * Source: Besiki Stvilia, Michael B. Twidale, Les Gasser, Linda C. Smith (graduate students at Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois)
 * Date: Fall 2005
 * Title: Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia
 * URLs: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki.pdf (draft version submitted to CIKM'05)

Findings
The focus of the paper was on assessing the information quality of featured articles — 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.