[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Gwern Branwen]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 6:33 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> All of this is fine, by the way, depending on what your intention was
> to show.  If it was to show that a certain type of external link can
> be removed without likely being reverted, then your methodology is
> fine.  But then you shouldn't advertise your experiment as "the
> removal of 100 random external links", because that is not what you
> did.

OK, do you have a better summary in 7 words?

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 8:02 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair at gmail.com> wrote:
> And those mistakes could have been prevented via consultation with the
> Wikipedia editing community.

Anthony's complaint there is more one complaining about what he thinks
is a misleading summary.

I don't regard it as a mistake, and so no consultation would have been
useful: if I were to do it again, I would do it the same way - I don't
care about how well official links are defended, because they tend to
be the most useless external links around and also are the most
permitted by EL. Worrying about them is roughly akin to an
inclusionist worrying that [[George Washington]] or [[Julius Caesar]]
might not be as well-defended as possible. They are the entries that
will be the very last to go under any scenario of decline. The
endangered links are links to news article, reviews, that sort of
thing, and my procedure examines them.

(No matter if those links were reverted at as much as 100%, since
fortunately they still only make up a fraction of external links, they
can under every scenario affect the final result only so much.)

As for the terminological dispute, if you take intent into account,
perhaps they are not vandalism; but the edits themselves in isolation
were designed to look like ordinary deletionist vandalism.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net