On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Charlotte Webb
<charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
But even though you'll find disagreement about how many links are
"enough" for a certain article. Five is right out. After a couple
hundred you'll find people fighting the other way with their
auto-delinking scripts/bots.
—C.W.
What I took from distribution of links (with a whole lot of
highly-linked articles) is that the shape of that curve seems to fit
with other patterns that happen, e.g., in scientific literature, and
that this is in some sense natural. In writing that article, I
tried to emphasize the different numbers for certain classes of
under-linked articles without dwelling on any particular definition of
"orphan". WikiProject Orphanage's definition seems useful for drawing
attention to the fact that proper linkage is more complex than just
"does anything link here, yes or no?".
But it seems like there may naturally be a significant number of
articles that ought to have only one incoming link, just based on the
nature of topics and their relationships to each other and on the
notion of "preferential attachment", which seems to describe the
natural structure of knowledge.
-Sage