On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 01:47, Andrew Alder wrote:
> 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.

No, it's not; it's exactly the same.  Consider (for ease of exposition)
an article in the middle of an edit war.  Three-quarters of the time it
has version "A" (the "stable" version); one-quarter of the time it has
version "B" (the "unstable" version).  Then, three-quarters of the time,
when the Google spider grabs and indexes this article, it will get
version "A".  Three-quarters of the time, if somebody did a full-text
search on the "current" wikipedia database, they would get version "A".
Exactly the same.

There's also the effect that Brion mentioned: even if Google happened to
index a "stable" version when the current version was "unstable", the
person would (by default) still end up reading the current, unstable
version.