Week 12 - Blog about Wikipedia:Articledevelopment (Kim jong min)

1) Summary

The Wikipedia article development process consists of organized steps from an initial stub to a complete featured article. The process includes a number of quality tiers: Start, Stub, Grade B, Grade C, START, GA (Good article), Grade A, and Feature article. Each tier has specific criteria and improvement requirements, and the quality of the article is incrementally improved through community review. Through this rating system, Wikipedia aims to ensure consistency and reliability of content.

2) Interesting find

What I found particularly interesting is that Wikipedia also evaluates the importance of an article: it categorizes it into best, top, medium, low, and worst based not only on the quality of the article, but also on the importance of the topic. It's impressive how they combine these two aspects (quality and importance) into a matrix to determine which articles should be prioritized for improvement.

3) Questions and discussion topics

I question the extent to which Wikipedia's quality assessment relies on the subjective judgment of editors. In particular, how can criteria such as "completeness" or "neutral perspective" be measured objectively? It is also worth discussing whether articles on minority topics or non-English speaking regions are fairly represented within this system. Could these articles be penalized for having fewer references or fewer editors?

Comments

  1. CHEN SIYUMay 20, 2025 at 6:38 PM

    This is a critical structural issue. Articles about underrepresented or non-Western topics often receive lower quality ratings—not because the topics lack merit, but because:

    They have fewer editors familiar with the subject matter;
    There may be fewer accessible or digitized sources in widely recognized languages (especially English);
    The notability standards and sourcing expectations are often calibrated to Western academic or media institutions, which can disadvantage topics outside that sphere.

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