G'day Peter and the Group

At 07:39 AM 4/12/03 +0000, Peter Bartlett wrote:

> . The not being realtime may be a plus or minus, this is the very thing we tossed around a little in the Pump.
> Certainly for Wikipedia contributors, realtime is best. But perhaps not so for readers, who are after stable content.

As was pointed out on the pump, there is no reason to suppose that the pedia was any more "stable" when Google took its snapshot than it is at any other time..

True. No argument at all with this.

But the probability that Google indexes a particular version is roughly proportional to the time for which that version is the current version. Therefore, the version presented by Google is on average more stable than the "current" version. I tried to point this out, but I'm afraid I didn't do it very clearly.

These two effects tend to cancel each other out. The version presented by Google is not necessarily better than the current version, but for readers it's probably no worse and may even be better. That was my point.

Andrew A

****
andrewa @ alder . ws
http://www.zeta.org.au/~andrewa
Phone 9441 4476
Mobile 04 2525 4476
****