Upon looking through Wikipedia last week, doing research for the previous article on Ultrinsic.com, I noticed the site has implemented a change that incorporates article ranking. Rating if an article is “well-sourced”, neutral, complete, and readable seems like information the free encyclopedia would like to know but also seems like it could be a move towards social news sites like Reddit or Old Digg.
The Article Assessment feature was one of many listed back on September 1st in a Wikimedia blog post as an upcoming project. The feature is in a pilot phase right now and is only implemented in the Public Policy section of Wikipedia articles. Halfway through the month, the Wikimedia Technical Blog gave an update to the feature and announced its deployment was planned for September 22nd. A couple days later, I stumbled upon it and you can see it in action at the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act article.
If you don’t want to head over to that article to see it, here’s a screenshot of the article assessment interface.
Humorously, you can also give feedback on the feedback tool. By clicking on the small link on the feature, you’ll receive a survey in a popup layer asking a few questions.
It will be interesting to see what the outcome of this pilot is and if the article assessment tool will makes it way into wide-spread usage across the site.