[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Ben Yates]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  No, that's not really true, because the wikipedia implicitly (not
>  deliberately) uses SEO techniques; google juice enters and never
>  leaves. Basically almost any article in the wikipedia ranks higher
>  than almost the rest of the web for that reason.

That's treating google as some sort of immovable force -- but pagerank
is ultimately, behind whatever soul-crushingly complex set of nested
algorithms, a *subjective* measure, tweaked by engineers who evaluate
different result sets by looking at them and deciding if they're
"good" (or equivalently, by monitoring what web surfers think is
"good").

So while SEOs like to think in terms of rules and algorithms, it's
much more practical (and satisfying) to forget all that shit and just
think in terms of creating useful, compelling content, trusting that
"google" will somehow be able to tell that high-quality wikipedia
articles aren't tarnished, action-at-a-distance style, by less visited
wikipedia articles elsewhere.

See, for example, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/07/64130

-- 
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com