On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
My experiment has concluded and all the link removals reverted*. The full writeup is at http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#sins-of-omission-exper...
Result: Of the 100 removals, just 3 were reverted.
3% is even lower than I expected, and very different from Horologium's estimate, incidentally.
Today I did a followup at the 1 month point, hand-checking the 100 links I restored to articles while cleaning up the experiment. Of the 100, 4 do not appear in the current version of the article.
(2 of the removals were in direct response to the restoration, while the other 2 are either unexplained and part of a large edit with many changes or got removed in a wholesale culling of the External links section.)
Those who think that 3% was the correct reversion rate for the removals are invited to explain how 4% could be the correct reversion rate for the re-adding of the same links - if it was acceptable for 97% to be removed in the first place, how could it also be acceptable for 94% to then be restored?