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.
Carl Witty