On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 18 April 2010 19:54, Philip Sandifer <snowspin...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> On Apr 17, 2010, at 8:26 AM, David Gerard wrote: >>> >>> Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many >>> ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find >>> useful. >> >> I'm not entirely sure of this. It is accurate to say that Wikipedia is found >> useful by people - but I'm not sure the current community and bureaucratic >> structures have anything to do with why. I suspect the useful parts are >> unevenly distributed towards articles older than five years. > > Interesting hypothesis. It is testable, too - we just need a bot to > sample a few thousand articles and compare their hits over the last > month, say, with their creation dates. I suspect you are wrong, > though, since you haven't accounted for current affairs articles and > pop culture articles which are very popular, but not for long.
I think that is the wrong metric. Lots of people look at the sex articles, but that isn't an indication that our sex articles are considered more useful than, say, our articles on rockets or gemstones. Sex just happens to have near-universal appeal— Joe might be interested in rocks, John might be interested in rockets, but they both have some interest in sex. As a result, "sex" a very popular subject everwhere on the internet. The same kind of comparison can be made for celebrity subjects. That a WP article gets a lot of traffic isn't always an indication that the content is useful. Most of the people hitting the article could be instantly hitting back because the article wasn't what they wanted. There are probably a hundred ways that we could try to measure something here, but I doubt we would agree on any one of them as measuring the right thing. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l