The WP article Academic studies about Wikipedia has enough stuff in it that it's worth a read. It discusses a number of wiki-political topics that have barely been mentioned on WR, and certainly nothing quantitatively.

Just as an example, did you know that RfA is stastistically negative impacted by number of previous RfA's? Okay, easy to guess if you've seen enough of them.

But how is RfA likelihood of passing impacted by 1000's of edits to the mainspace? Versus 1000's of prevous edits to project or talk space? And did you know all this started to change in 2006? Your Wikiproject edits are now MUCH more important (massively more) important to your chance of passing RfA than article edits or diversity of article contributions. Even your TALK page edits are far more important than article edits. How much more? It's been quantitated for you. Your admin/noticeboard edits don't get noticed. Nor even if you say thanks in edit summaries (at least not much).

Factor
2006–2007
(pre–2006)

number of previous RfA attempts
-14.8%
( -11.1%)

months since first edit
0.4%
(0.2%)

every 1000 article edits
1.8%
(1.1%)

every 1000 Wikipedia policy edits
19.6%
(0.4%)

every 1000 WikiProject edits
17.1%
(7.2%)

every 1000 article talk edits
6.3%
15.4%

each Arb/mediation/wikiquette edit
-0.1%
-0.2%

diversity score (see text-- number of types of article subjects edited)
2.8%
3.7%

minor edits percentage
0.2%
0.2%

edit summaries percentage
0.5%
0.4%

"thanks" in edit summaries
0.3%
(0.0%)

Use of "POV" in edit summaries
0.1%
(0.0%)

Admin attention/noticeboard edits
-0.1%
(0.2%)


For a lot more of this kind of stuff, I highly recommend the above summary and some the articles it links to.

I score 385%. Do you think they'd let me put four socks through RFA?

It appears to me to a digest article in the true since of word, abstracting research on a topic, without providing encyclopedic coverage. It doesn't belong in article namespace.

There is also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:STUDIES which provides a more or less exhaustive bibliography of studies of Wikipedia.

Doesn't bother me. Sanger's passion for perfection has been the enemy of his getting anything done. This is how articles (even good ones) grow and come into being on WP. They don't all get written from scratch by some expert. Most go from stub to collection of abstracted summary facts to some kind of interwoven story which then gets tweeked and more cites added and errors fixed. In the meantime it's not pretty, but better than nothing.

The whole idea of flagged and cited versions is the so articles have signs: Under Construction. Not ready for habitation. Hardhat area. Watch floor for nails....


Ah, yes, thanks. I see it's in the SEE ALSO of the first article. An extensive list-article bibliography indeed.