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On the Evolution of Quality Flaws and the Effectiveness of Cleanup Tags in the English Wikipedia

The improvement of information quality is a major task for the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Recent studies targeted the analysis and detection of specific quality flaws in Wikipedia articles. To date, quality flaws have been exclusively investigated in current Wikipedia articles, based on a snapshot representing the state of Wikipedia at a certain time. This paper goes further, and provides the first comprehensive breakdown of the evolution of quality flaws in Wikipedia. We utilize cleanup tags to analyze the quality flaws that have been tagged by the Wikipedia community in the English Wikipedia, from its launch in 2001 until 2011. This leads to interesting findings regarding (1) the development of Wikipedia’s quality flaw structure and (2) the usage and the effectiveness of cleanup tags. Specifically, we show that inline tags are more effective than tag boxes, and provide statistics about the considerable volume of rare and non-specific cleanup tags. We expect that this work will support the Wikipedia community in making quality assurance activities more efficient.