On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@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&a... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HUD_%28video_gaming%29&diff=pr...
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