On 18 April 2010 20:22, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
It's not a perfect metric, but it is probably the best one we can actually measure. A metric we can't measure is completely useless. When choosing a metric you always have to compromise between ease of measurement and strength of correlation to the quantity you are interested in. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l