On Mar 8, 2008, at 5:02 AM, Matthew Brown wrote:
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/03/2008, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low.
Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though. Why would people bother contributing if nobody reads it? Do our audience want us to be high in google rankings? I would think so. A *lot* of people find wikipedia articles that way. You more or less seem to be saying you don't care about what our audience wants. Well, it's an argument.
If Wikipedia has good content people will read it. We have had little trouble finding readers without doing anything in particular to play to the search engines, and I suspect this will continue.
Well, and more to the point, we hit top ten Alexa status well before deletionism became as terrifyingly in vogue as it is now.
Remember our list of top 100 articles. It turns out our readers mostly do use us for anime and porn. Now, that means we should give really good anime and porn coverage. But the idea that if we allow these articles to flourish we'll lose readers is utterly unsupported by any evidence.
-Phil