Delirium wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
Ah, now I see: This "experiment" is,
truth be told, an Alzheimer
prevention program to make you remember your password! :-)
Seriously: While a scientific experiment is open in its outcome, it is
in some way designed along an expectation, namely that your working
hypothesis is correct. Only if the experiment shows that this hypothesis
is false, you will consider altering or abandoning it.
At least in the science I'm familiar with, you might personally think
that your hypothesis is correct (or else you would have hypothesized
something else), but the *experiment* is supposed to be designed from
the point of view of a skeptic who believes it to be false.
Technically, we'd
have to run a second wikipedia, mirrored at the point
where anaon article creation was disallowed on *one* of them, as a
"negative control" :-)
Since practical reasons prevent us from doing that, we'll have to
compare statistics to the last few month. We should also take opinions
(yes!) from the "new pages patrol" people into acount, wether the
creation of junk pages has dropped noticably.
Ultimately, to see if reality matches your hypothesis, you'll have to
apply the conditions of that hypothesis to reality and see if it matches
the expected outcome. That's what we are doing. If the results do not
match our expectations, thus proving our theory wrong, we'll take the
changes back; I have no doubt about this.
Magnus
(yes, I know the scientific hypothesis analogy is a little flawed...)