Wikipedia Page Ratings for "September 11 Attacks"

Wikipedia has a relatively new feature.  Since July of last year it allows readers to rate pages.  The rating feature is found at the bottom of each page.  Ratings reports like the one below apparently don't reflect every rating of a page since this feature was turned on.  I haven't been able to find a description of exactly how the ratings are accumulated, but when pages change (are edited) I believe the ratings start over again.   Following is a snapshot of the page ratings for Wikipedia's page describing the September 11 attacks. The page is little more than a thoroughly detailed and totally documented rehash of the reports from NIST and the 9/11 Commission. It's interesting to observe that 1182 people rated the page's completeness (on average) a 1 on the 1 to 5 scale (with 1 being least and 5 being greatest).  

Wikipedia's Current Page Rating for 9/11 Attacks

Manipulation of Ratings at Wikipedia?

The screenshot above came from last Friday (Feb 10th). Over the weekend seven or so ratings (increasing the total number of people rating the page to 1165) were added to the page. That brought the "Objective" rating down to 2.8. The "Trustworthy" rating was also fell to the 3.1 level and the "Complete" and "Well-written" ratings stayed at 1. Today (10:30am Central Time on 14Feb2012, Tuesday) the ratings for the page are:

Rating Categories Average Rating Number of People Rating
Trustworthy 3.3 1229
Objective 3.1 1158
Complete 3.3 1182
Well-written 3.6 1260

Draw your own conclusions.

I have

This is right after submitting my own ratings (All 1's).

It's evidently a bug. The ratings for complete and well-written jumped to 1.0 after voting. Some advice: be very mindful of the furtive fallacy in IT. You cleared your cookies, which apparently influence the bug, and that's why you saw the normal values again.

Nice job with LEADTOOLS on the image btw. I like the "tore up" effect.

P.S. apparently the "last modified" field is buggy too, if you come in through an alias page name. (Then again, depending on which developer you ask, they may think of it as a feature)

Wow!

Thanks, SnowCrash. Your expert explanation is much appreciated... I guess it just goes to show what expert analysis can do to clear up mysteries, no matter how misguided the initial report is...

Peculiar results

To me, anyway. To a large degree, my pereception of the objectivity and trustworthiness of a piece of writing correlates with my sense of its completeness. Sometimes, a different way of saying 'not complete' is 'one-sided'--which is recognized as the antithesis of 'objective' and 'trustworthy'.