Arbital quality

arbital_quality.json

https://arbital.com/p/arbital_quality

by Eric Bruylant Jun 30 2016 updated Jul 16 2016

Arbital's system for tracking page quality.

Arbital's quality scale is used to track the quality of pages on Arbital. To request a review ask on Arbital Slack (#reviews) or make a comment on the page tagging Eric Bruylant.

Quality tags

Other

Although some of our tags use the same names as Wikipedia's system and have similar definitions, the requirements are not identical and editors from Wikipedia should not expect equivalence.

Unassessed, Stub, and Start may be used by anyone, C-Class by trusted editors, B-Class and A-Class by domain moderators, and Featured by Team Arbital.

Comments

Eric Rogstad

Other

Are the other tags part of the quality scale?

When a page has the message, "This page's quality is unknown. Can you add a quality tag?" will adding one of the other tags make that message go away, or only the official quality tags?

Eric Bruylant

Unclear how best to proceed. In particular, I'm unsure about how Proof, List, and Formal definition should interact with the quality scale. It's both bad to give them high-quality tags (they dominate lists of HQ pages, people think they're meant to be good explanations), and bad to give the low-quality (pages which do their job correctly are flagged as needing attention indefinitely). I have some ideas about cheating the tradeoff, bt not distilled yet.

Featured should make the other messages go away, as should WIP and still needs work (replacing message bar). I think Out of date probably should as well.

Malcolm McCrimmon

Do user pages need quality tags? That seems unnecessary to me…

Eric Bruylant

Excellent point. Filing a bug.

Malcolm Ocean

For reference: the bottom of this proposal describes a similar content ranking system, although it doesn't encapsulate brevity and it includes a-0 = "you're stupider for reading it." The full list is below. Each has more description, but I wasn't sure it made sense to quote that much text here.

  • a-5: Content is definitional in its field. […]
  • a-4: Very high-quality documents. […]
  • a-3: Quality presentation of a concept or topic. […]
  • a-2: Informative but not exceptional. […]
  • a-1: Not obviously false reporting. […]
  • a-0: You're stupider for reading it. […]

The author also notes

There's a tremendous amount I don't classify, of course, and some (though not all) of that would fall under a negative level classification.
I've also thought of creating an upper-level classification, a-6, for materials which introduce a (currently) entirely novel concept. Strictly, works such as Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin, or Claude Shannon's information theory papers should be here, though they now largely belong to history as opposed to current development. I may move them to this realm.

I think that this raises a valuable point, which I would characterize as a distinction between a work that summarizes or explains a concept that has already been presented elsewhere (Arbital's math section would be this) versus a work that explicates something as an authoritative, original source (which would include some of the AI Safety content on Arbital).

This is slightly different than the person I'm quoting here, in that something doesn't have to be defining of an entirely new field in order to itself be a new concept. So maybe there are three categories, with one being "this is an original extension of an existing concept". Much of what I've written falls in this category.

It seems like this kind of metadata might be quite valuable to have on Arbital pages, especially as it grows as a content platform.