[WikiEN-l] Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 4:20 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I know some Wikipedians were asking Google "wtf? Could you at least
>> not rank us three pages behind our own mirrors?"
>>
>
> And Google complied, implementing a duplicate content penalty which
> eliminated mirrors and forks alike (and is probably hurting Citizendium
> right this very moment).  My point exactly.

I thought Citizendium had declined to copy any Wikipedia content. How
then could such a algorithm tweak matter to them?

(I will note that things have gotten much better. Back in 2004 or so
if I had ran a Google search for [[Medici Bank]], the results would've
been all cluttered up by mirrors of WP; but now it's pretty rare to
run into a mirror, and I think the last one I found unbidden was
Wapedia, which admittedly isn't exactly the same content as WP.)

-- 
gwern