On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 7:47 PM, David Levy <lifeisunf...@gmail.com> wrote: > There's no harm in discussing the methodology (but not the specific > targets or IP addresses), thereby confirming its validity and ensuring > that the effort isn't needlessly duplicated by multiple editors across > countless articles.
Alright, fine, I will copy in my current writeup minus the list of targets and the yet to be conducted analysis. > Again, what if hundreds or thousands of users, whose methodologies are > undiscussed and potentially flawed, were to take it upon themselves to > conduct such "experiments" without consultation or approval? That's > the hypothetical scenario to which I referred. It's unfortunate that I am such a prominent figure and powerful thought-leader that hundreds and thousands of Wikipedians have even a tiny chance of mimicking my actions; but that's a risk you just have to take when you are as world-renowned as I am. I'm sure Kant would understand. --- ... The procedure: remove random links and record whether they are restored to obtain a restoration rate. - Editors might defer to other editors, so I will remove links as a anonymous user from multiple proxies; the restoration rate will naturally be an *under*estimate of what a registered editor would be able to commit, much less a tendentious deletionist. - To avoid issues with selecting links, I will remove only the final external link on pages selected by <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random#External_links> which have at least 2 external links in an 'External links' section, and where the final external link is neither an 'official' link nor template-generated. (This avoids issues where pages might have 5 or 10 'official' external links to various versions or localizations, all of which an editor could confidently and blindly revert the removal of; template-generated links also carry imprimaturs of authority.) - The edit summary for each edit will be `remove external link per [[WP:EL]]` - which has the nice property of being obviously meaningless to anyone capable of critical thought (by definition a link removal should be per one of WP:EL's criterions - but *which* [criterion](!Wikipedia "Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be avoided")?) but also official-looking like many deletionist edit-summaries. - To avoid flooding issues and be less obvious, no more than 5 or 10 links a day will be removed with at least 1 minute between each edit. - To avoid building up credibility, I will not make any real edits with the anonymous IPs After the last of the 100 links have been removed, I will wait 1 month (long enough for the edit to drop off all watchlists) and restore all links. I predict [at least half](http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6586) will not be restored and certainly not [more than 90%](http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6585). ... -- gwern _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l