I just replicated this analysis. I think you might have made some mistakes.
I took a random sample of non-redirect articles from English Wikipedia and compared the byte_length (from database) to the content_length (from API, tags and comments stripped).
I get a pearson correlation coef of *0.9514766*.
See the attached scatter plot including a linear regression line. See also the regress output below.
Call: lm(formula = page_len ~ content_length, data = pages)
Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -38263 -419 82 592 37605
Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) -97.40412 72.46523 -1.344 0.179 content_length 1.14991 0.00832 138.210 <2e-16 *** --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 2722 on 1998 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.9053, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9053 F-statistic: 1.91e+04 on 1 and 1998 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Floeck, Fabian (AIFB) < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi, to whoever is interested in this (and I hope I didn't just repeat someone else's experiments on this):
I wanted to know if a "long" or "short" article in terms of how much readable material (excluding pictures) is presented to the reader in the front-end is correlated to the byte size of the Wikisyntax which can be obtained from the DB or API; as people often define the "length" of an article by its length in bytes.
TL;DR: Turns out size in bytes is a really, really bad indicator for the actual, readable content of a Wikipedia article, even worse than I thought.
We "curl"ed the front-end HTML of all articles of the English Wikipedia (ns=0, no disambiguation, no redirects) between 5800 and 6000 bytes (as around 5900 bytes is the total en.wiki average for these articles). = 41981 articles. Results for size in characters (w/ whitespaces) after cleaning the HTML out: Min= 95 Max= 49441 Mean=4794.41 Std. Deviation=1712.748
Especially the gap between Min and Max was interesting. But templates make it possible. (See e.g. "Veer Teja Vidhya Mandir School", "Martin Callanan" -- Allthough for the ladder you could argue that expandable template listings are not really main "reading" content..)
Effectively, correlation for readable character size with byte size = 0.04 (i.e. none) in the sample.
If someone already did this or a similar analysis, I'd appreciate pointers.
Best,
Fabian
-- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods
Dipl.-Medwiss. Fabian Flöck Research Associate
Building 11.40, Room 222 KIT-Campus South D-76128 Karlsruhe
Phone: +49 721 608 4 6584 Fax: +49 721 608 4 6580 Skype: f.floeck_work E-Mail: [email protected] WWW: http://www.aifb.kit.edu/web/Fabian_Fl%C3%B6ck
KIT – University of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg and National Research Center of the Helmholtz Association
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