Wikipedia commentary/Wikipedia quality

Wikipedia is both a product and a process. As a product it may not seem all that exciting, or even respectable. As a process, however, it is quite remarkable.

Seeing it as a process, Wikipedia can be judged not by its state at any given moment but by how well it is growing, how well it is becoming what it will become.

One way of understanding the process is by imagining a perfect article, one that ranks as a 100 on a scale of 100. An article that does not yet exist would be a 0, and a stub article would be perhaps a 1. The Wikipedia process works by constantly improving the quality of any given article, such that any significant edit moves the article 10% closer to perfection.

A first edit might move an article from 0 to 10 on a scale of 100. Viewed as a product, an article with a 10 score must seem pretty lame. But as the process continues, the article constantly improves. The next edit moves it 10% closer, to 19, the next to 27.1, etc. As further edits accumulate, the quality of the article moves asymptotically towards perfection, and likewise the quality of the encyclopedia as a whole.

Feel free to use anything from any page on Wikipedia or my K5 article(s) to expand this. I think Wikipedia/Our Replies to Our Critics would be a better place for this and that a Q&A format would work well. --Larry