by C.V.Rajan

Created on: April 01, 2009

Concern about the quality of articles appearing in Helium in general and about the quality actually reflected by the ranking system in Helium in particular are being debated widely in Helium discussion boards.

What constitutes quality in an article? It is to do with the the content as well as the presentation.

Content includes aspects like usefulness of the material given, factual correctness, ease of reading, flow and style and a sense of authority conveyed in the writing. Content concerns also covers issues related to profanity, plagiarism, off-topic presentation etc.

Quality of presentation covers good formatting of the article and freedom from grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, punctuation faults , errors in sentence structures etc.

Flagging is an effective tool to bring to the notice of Helium as well as the authors, issues relating to both content as well as presentation. However, at present, in Helium, flagging has been restricted to issues on plagiarism, profanity, self promotion, adult content, illegal, off topic and incorrect information. To this list, I would suggest addition of one more aspect "poor quality" or "sub-standard". This option of course has a potential of subjective misuse. This flagging tool can perhaps be given to writers of say, 3 star writing quality only.

Issues relating to presentation of the article, namely, formatting, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, punctuation faults , errors in sentence structures etc have been taken totally out of the purview of flagging. In my personal opinion, this is not the right approach to ensure quality in Helium. I strongly believe that there should be means made available to do flagging of articles for the above issues too. If you come across such issues, Helium wants you to just "inform" the author about it, (without hurting his/ her ego, perhaps!). It is totally up to the author to set right the issue or not.

I believe when somebody really points out a mistake, and if it is in the form of a flag, it hurts, but it really helps one to set right the mistake quickly.

During my starting stage in Helium, I wrote one article in a hurry out of over enthusiasm and posted it straight away without checking it. At that period, flagging was there and I received a flag with a comment "more than 2 dozen petty mistakes in spelling and grammar". I was shocked.

When I went through the article peacefully, I could locate at least 10 obvious mistakes (though the one flagged it was a bit too strong in his criticism as "2 dozen" was rather an exaggeration!). But the point was, my article did have too many mistakes. And his sharp criticism really helped me.

So, I feel Helium should once again to bring back flagging for grammar, spelling etc.

It could be categorized into two levels, based on severity of the issues.

(a) "Minor grammar / spelling / sentence structure / formatting problems - needs correction".

(b) "Serious grammar/ spelling / sentence structure / formatting problems "Needs serious review"
Helium can also device some mechanism to count the flags received by an article and if it exceeds certain numbers, Helium can do a forced downgrading of the article in the ranks. This will definitely force an author to be more alert; he/ she cannot sit pretty doing nothing when several people keep flagging their articles.

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