Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Metrics for measuring article reliability

message: What articles? In the Wikipedia? On the Web? Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't understand this at all. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 13:28, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course it's about Wikipedia. Maybe the proposal is now easier to understand --85.25.136.135 19:04, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You want a hit counter on the article pages. My understanding is that this is a problem, as most hits are on cache servers rather than the main database. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 19:15, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe the cache servers keep logs so the cached hits could be added retroactively. At least it would be interesting how big the overhead for such a solution would be. It would be nice if it could work, however, as it would be step into a more community-based direction of quality assurance opposing to recent movements to hierarchical solutions which are a bit against the initial momentum that made Wikipedia that successful. --85.178.36.219 21:56, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: My suggestion is to ask about this over at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). -- Donald Albury(Talk) 23:34, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's now also discussed there. Additionally, there is a discussion about the more theoretical considerations of this mechanism at . --128.42.6.133 10:08, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Logging is minimal for performance reasons. If I remember correctly, neither the cache servers nor the Apache servers keep logs with the required detail. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 07:48, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

message: It occurred to me in the course of an afd discussion that a metric for stability of an article ("Thi s article is .... and unstable"; "no it isn't is is .... and stable") would be useful.  i see it mentioned in passing here.  How might one go about that?  Stability is probably a component of reliability, and one that makes less demands on the servers than counting hits.  Midgley 17:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A metric for stability 

message: There are better methods than a hit counter. Hit counters are rather coarse indicators, only weakly linked to an article's reliability. (And by the way, for the nay-sayers on technical grounds, it would be easy to take a random but representative sample of page hits, and extrapolate from there.)
For instance, one could use simply time since last edit. Or, one could use a "stability" metric- if too much of an article changes within a particular time period, then it is marked unstable (the major changes possibly being vandalism or a major rewriting or addition which is still not quite tweaked). Or one could work on the basis of reverts- the fewer reverts in a time period the better, or possibly whether the article is currently in a state that it is often reverted to (ie. two separate vandalism-versions would be favored less than the original version the article was reverted back to twice; edits could be seen as votes for a particular version); you could go with more elaborate versions which use trust metrics, in which a highly-rated editor "endorses" versions of articles (or possibly just sections of an article).... This has all be discussed a lot before, on Meta if nowhere else. This policy needs vastly more work. --maru   (talk)  contribs 07:09, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better methods