On 13/09/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I'm going to take down the wikicharts tool if I continue to see it used incorrectly to argument stupid arguments.
Noooooooooooooooooo! (please)
First of all, the tool is not accurate enough to actually provide the relative ranking of the articles due to the low sampling rate and ease of spoofing. It merely provides a list of top articles and a suggestion of their possible relative rankings. Secondly, we are not provided with any of another important metrics. For example, if a person googles for "penis anal fisting rectum succubus" they'll get [[Anal Sex]] and be counted as any other reader, but I'd be willing to bet good money that 9 out of 10 look at the page for all of 5 seconds before realizing that this is not the hardcore porno they were looking for and they hit the back button. ... We don't know how long people stay, we don't know how they arrived, we don't know if they read anything else.. we don't know if they found what they were looking for.... The fact of the matter is quite simply that we don't know much, and we certainly can't say from the data we have that we have any clue about what people want.
The charts page could do with a note to this effect.
... and I don't think thats a big deal. Nothing about creating a free content encyclopedia or freeing the knowledge of the world requires that we be the number one destination for the news of the day.
Indeed. I really feel our popularity right now is not good for us at all - look at the gross immediatism fostered by BLP, and apparently serious proposals to gut all living bios because Wikipedia is too popular. This directly hampers our efforts to actually write a good encyclopedia for tomorrow as well as today.
- d.