Talk:Emerging strategic priorities/ESP 3 key questions/Are vital articles the right measure of encyclopedic or core reference content?

There are many ways to measure the quality of online encyclopedia, wiktionary or stock photography :

A set of vital articles
A fast access to information
A reactive editor staff
A good paper rendering of articles
An easy way to modify/upgrade/correct any Wikimedia "outlet" (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Commons, etc.)
An easy way to check the validity of information
An almost complete "outlet"

Cantons-de-l'Est 13:05, 25 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In theory. But we need a better mechanism for flagging vital articles. Some Wikiprojects are doing a good job. We may benefit from academic partnerships, on a subject-by-subject basis.

Actually, what we once tried to do in Russian Wikipedia (and eventually got stuck) is to considerably extend the list of vital articles: for instance, going from 1000 to order of 10K or even more. We made a list of fields (like math, physics, law, sports etc) with the idea of making the lists of vital articles for each field (which eventually should be expanded to the level of featured articles or good articles). It actually turned out to be very difficult, since one needs real experts having an overview in the whole field. I tried to engage external experts (just to make the lists at this stage, not to write the articles), but with very little success. However, if such lists could be made (I assume a core is the same for all projects, but some details like for instance literature, art, and history, could differ from project to project), the availability and quality of articles would be a good measure of quality. In the absence of such a list, one can still think of some lesser size sample sets.--Yaroslav Blanter 08:20, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yaroslav Blanter's comment interests me. I think it is a great idea to have such lists made. This should be done globally, not locally, because many communities know more than one community. Woudloper 23:52, 1 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This is in principle correct, just some portions are community-specific: for instance, the article on Multatuli to Dutch community is important, whereas for the Arabic community it may be of much less importance; at the same time, the Arabic community may decide to work on the article on Naghib Mahfouz instead. (just to give an example).--Yaroslav Blanter 12:27, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think Yaroslav's approach has promise. Libraries have been doing hierarchical categorizations for decades, and perhaps some of these (or relevant ontologies) can be turned into a useful set of vital articles. Probably will end up needing to be discipline-specific, though, and definitely requires expert input. --Mietchen 22:19, 26 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Though Meta has a list of articles, the English Wikipedia has not one, not two, but three lists of 1000 core articles. I think that making such lists is subjective and contentious. Furthermore, vital articles tend to be very general, which may (because I have no statistics) not be what most people look up. We should consider what level of detail is most important. I'm guessing it's more specific than Sports (a vital article) and less specific than Donald Bradman with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (a featured article). HereToHelp (talk) 04:51, 27 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Problem with vital article list is that some article (ie, Donald Bradman) is not vital/relevent in other Wiki. Yosri 04:48, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]