Size matters: word count as a measure of quality on wikipedia

  • Authors:
  • Joshua E. Blumenstock

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia", now contains over two million English articles, and is widely regarded as a high-quality, authoritative encyclopedia. Some Wikipedia articles, however, are of questionable quality, and it is not always apparent to the visitor which articles are good and which are bad. We propose a simple metric -- word count -- for measuring article quality. In spite of its striking simplicity, we show that this metric significantly outperforms the more complex methods described in related work.