[WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Carl (CBM)]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Result: Of the 100 removals, just 3 were reverted.

You removed 100 external links and only 3 of the removals were
reverted. I don't find that very surprising. My experience with
external links is that *on average* they are low quality, and many of
them do fail WP:EL.  Of course there are good external links, but they
are a minority on the articles I follow. Examples include these
removals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scala_%28programming_language%29&diff=prev&oldid=489800521
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HUD_%28video_gaming%29&diff=prev&oldid=487559372

I suppose I am not a "deletionist" because I only remove the ones that
are most blatantly spam or free of content.  But there are many more
that I would not worry about if someone else removed them.

Separately, the median number of watchlisters for the 100 pages you
edited is 5. And we have no way to get the names of the watchlisters
to see whether they are active. So for many of the pages, it seems
plausible nobody even noticed that the link was removed. That is a
separate issue unrelated to links.

- Carl