On 25 Aug 2004, at 22:05, wikien-l-request@Wikipedia.org wrote:
How does having articles of borderline interest make it unusable? If I type "George Washington" into Google and end up at the excellent Wikipedia article of the same name, Wikipedia has proved very usuable. It is completely irrelevant whether a borderline article such as "George from Rainbow" is also available *for those who search for it*
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Pete/Pcb21
If all search results were always 100% accurate, well then... I'd agree with you Pete. However: In this imperfect world with imperfect Google search results, people *will* run across such "rubbish" or "not up to our standards" articles pretty quickly on Google the longer said articles stay online here. It's not exactly like we're situated at the a*se end of domain space that Google bots warely visit.
So Rick has a fair point there.
- Jens
If all search results were always 100% accurate, well then... I'd agree with you Pete. However: In this imperfect world with imperfect Google search results, people *will* run across such "rubbish" or "not up to our standards" articles pretty quickly on Google the longer said articles stay online here. It's not exactly like we're situated at the a*se end of domain space that Google bots warely visit.
So Rick has a fair point there.
- Jens
However, when searching for "George Washington", the proper article is going to appear *much* higher on the list that "George Washington's underwear". People are only likely to come across "bad" articles when they search for them. Also, Google's pagerank system means that good articles are going to appear much higher in search results.
I'd also like to point that many stubs and "bad" articles have become very good or even featured articles.
-- - gracefool