[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

Wed Sep 13 10:17:54 UTC 2006

On 9/12/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> They do however illustrate the conflict between providing what people
> want (more articles on sex and pro wrestling apparently) and creating
> what we believe should exist.
[snip]

I'm going to take down the wikicharts tool if I continue to see it
used incorrectly to argument stupid arguments.

First of all, the tool is not accurate enough to actually provide the
relative ranking of the articles due to the low sampling rate and ease
of spoofing. It merely provides a list of top articles and a
suggestion of their possible relative rankings.

Secondly, we are not provided with any of another important metrics.
For example, if a person googles for "penis anal fisting rectum
succubus" they'll get [[Anal Sex]] and be counted as any other reader,
but I'd be willing to bet good money that 9 out of 10 look at the page
for all of 5 seconds before realizing that this is not the hardcore
porno they were looking for and they hit the back button. ... We don't
know how long people stay, we don't know how they arrived, we don't
know if they read anything else.. we don't know if they found what
they were looking for....

The fact of the matter is quite simply that we don't know much, and we
certainly can't say from the data we have that we have any clue about
what people want.

... and I don't think thats a big deal. Nothing about creating a free
content encyclopedia or freeing the knowledge of the world requires
that we be the number one destination for the news of the day.