On 18 April 2010 19:54, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Apr 17, 2010, at 8:26 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many
ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find
useful.
I'm not entirely sure of this. It is accurate to say that Wikipedia is found useful
by people - but I'm not sure the current community and bureaucratic structures have
anything to do with why. I suspect the useful parts are unevenly distributed towards
articles older than five years.
Interesting hypothesis. It is testable, too - we just need a bot to
sample a few thousand articles and compare their hits over the last
month, say, with their creation dates. I suspect you are wrong,
though, since you haven't accounted for current affairs articles and
pop culture articles which are very popular, but not for long.