On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 7:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com wrote:
There's no harm in discussing the methodology (but not the specific targets or IP addresses), thereby confirming its validity and ensuring that the effort isn't needlessly duplicated by multiple editors across countless articles.
Alright, fine, I will copy in my current writeup minus the list of targets and the yet to be conducted analysis.
Again, what if hundreds or thousands of users, whose methodologies are undiscussed and potentially flawed, were to take it upon themselves to conduct such "experiments" without consultation or approval? That's the hypothetical scenario to which I referred.
It's unfortunate that I am such a prominent figure and powerful thought-leader that hundreds and thousands of Wikipedians have even a tiny chance of mimicking my actions; but that's a risk you just have to take when you are as world-renowned as I am. I'm sure Kant would understand.
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... The procedure: remove random links and record whether they are restored to obtain a restoration rate.
- Editors might defer to other editors, so I will remove links as a anonymous user from multiple proxies; the restoration rate will naturally be an *under*estimate of what a registered editor would be able to commit, much less a tendentious deletionist. - To avoid issues with selecting links, I will remove only the final external link on pages selected by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random#External_links which have at least 2 external links in an 'External links' section, and where the final external link is neither an 'official' link nor template-generated. (This avoids issues where pages might have 5 or 10 'official' external links to various versions or localizations, all of which an editor could confidently and blindly revert the removal of; template-generated links also carry imprimaturs of authority.) - The edit summary for each edit will be `remove external link per [[WP:EL]]` - which has the nice property of being obviously meaningless to anyone capable of critical thought (by definition a link removal should be per one of WP:EL's criterions - but *which* [criterion](!Wikipedia "Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be avoided")?) but also official-looking like many deletionist edit-summaries. - To avoid flooding issues and be less obvious, no more than 5 or 10 links a day will be removed with at least 1 minute between each edit. - To avoid building up credibility, I will not make any real edits with the anonymous IPs
After the last of the 100 links have been removed, I will wait 1 month (long enough for the edit to drop off all watchlists) and restore all links. I predict [at least half](http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6586) will not be restored and certainly not [more than 90%](http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6585). ...