On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
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&a... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HUD_%28video_gaming%29&diff=pr...
I actually find your examples amusing. The HUD link was one of the ones I was seriously considering not restoring because it was a junk link; while I was especially disappointed to see that the Scala editors did not restore the link for what is not just their standard IDE, but a major reason for use of their language, an examplar of their close alliance/fusion with Java, and a vital resource to link especially given how impoverished the external links section was. (And I've never written a line of Scala in my life!)
Separately, the median number of watchlisters for the 100 pages you edited is 5.
Where is this figure coming from?
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.
If the community "exists" but is inactive, that's as bad as it not existing. Wikipedia is as Wikipedia does. Either way, the test is revealing.