Specifically, the main quality factors in people reading a Wikipedia page are (a) the existence of the page (!), (b) whether the page has the stuff they were looking for.
(c) whether the information on the page is accurate.
I proxied the first by number of pages, and the second by length of the pages that already existed.
Except not all topics and not all information are of equal interest to people.
FWIW, my impression is that data on Wikipedia has gotten somewhat more accurate over time, due to the push for more citations, though I think much of this effect occurred before the decline started. I think the push for accuracy has traded off a lot against growth of content (both growth in number of pages and growth in amount of data on each page). These are crude impressions (I’ve read some relevant research but don’t have strong reason to believe that should be decisive in this evaluation) but I’m curious to hear what specific impressions you have that are contrary to this.
If you have more fine-grained data at your disposal on different topics and how much each has grown or shrunk in terms of number of pages, data available on each page, and accuracy, please share :).
(c) whether the information on the page is accurate.
Except not all topics and not all information are of equal interest to people.
FWIW, my impression is that data on Wikipedia has gotten somewhat more accurate over time, due to the push for more citations, though I think much of this effect occurred before the decline started. I think the push for accuracy has traded off a lot against growth of content (both growth in number of pages and growth in amount of data on each page). These are crude impressions (I’ve read some relevant research but don’t have strong reason to believe that should be decisive in this evaluation) but I’m curious to hear what specific impressions you have that are contrary to this.
If you have more fine-grained data at your disposal on different topics and how much each has grown or shrunk in terms of number of pages, data available on each page, and accuracy, please share :).