On 10/4/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/4/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Wouldn't the impact of a deletion be measured by the number of times "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." is viewed?
The negative impact, perhaps... but even that incompletely: Web searches don't normally take people to non-existent pages.
It only measures the impact according to the definition given by the researchers. That definition is what is incomplete. To be complete it'd have to measure how many people would have viewed the page would the edit not have been made. In the case of deletion which lasts a long time that's significant, but it's there in every edit, especially ones that remove information.
There is also a positive impact from some deletion, but thats harder to measure.
I think the impact has to be measured separately from whether or not the edit was positive.
If "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" is better than the previous text, then it's a positive deletion, and anyone who viewed that page would be impacted by it. The impact is the same whether the deletion was positive or negative. Whether a deletion is positive or negative is usually subjective, but then again so is whether or not most edits are positive or negative.