[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits

Mon Sep 2 20:06:17 UTC 2002

Taking up the gauntlet that KQ has hurled down ;->, I have thrown
together a Perl script (undoubtedly hideously inefficient; I am not a
native speaker of Perl) that has automated this process -- it repeatedly
calls Wikipedia's random page link, grabs the title, drops all dates,
turns all punctuation (including subpage slashes) into spaces, googles
for the result, and looks for links to "wikipedia."

Sample output, with comments added:

	269		# date, not googled
	Truth drug	# googled, but not found
	Aconitine	# a hit!
	<a href=http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Aconitine><b>Aconitine</b></a>
	Famous Canadians
	1 E 1 m	# probably shouldn't be googled, but currently is

Would anyone be interested in seeing this cleaned up and turned into a
regular report?

--~~~ the Epopt, aka...

--
 Sean Barrett     | Hey! Chuft-Captain!
 sean at epoptic.com | What sthondhat was your mother?

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com
[mailto:wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com]On Behalf Of
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 09:41
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits

hello, I've started a new page for obsessive editors, wikipediholics,
and the frequently bored and diligent.  It's an incomplete listing of
articles which land in the top 10 google results by searching for title
alone (in the case of slashes, parentheses etc. it's nice if they turn
up in the top 10 without special punctuation.).    Anyway, take a look
at it if you're interested:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ATop_10_Google_hits

Automation in this regard would be nice, but oh well.  And, BTW, I'm not
presenting this as a way to shame anyone, by any means--three of the
articles written almost exclusively by me are on the list ([[canna
lily]], [[Joel and Ethan Coen]], and [[Dziga Vertov]]), and I've already
added 2 paragraphs to canna lily.  Needless to say, it's moved Dziga up
on my priority list also, since I don't cover the last 15 years of his
life at all.

Best,

kq

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