[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

Wed Sep 13 10:31:28 UTC 2006

On 13/09/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

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

Noooooooooooooooooo! (please)

> 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.

The charts page could do with a note to this effect.

> ... 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.

Indeed. I really feel our popularity right now is not good for us at
all - look at the gross immediatism fostered by BLP, and apparently
serious proposals to gut all living bios because Wikipedia is too
popular. This directly hampers our efforts to actually write a good
encyclopedia for tomorrow as well as today.

- d.