I have just completed and written up a little research project of mine: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#the-editing-community-...
Summary:
1. Talk pages are where references/links/citations go to die; less than 10% ever make it back 2. In just the sampled edits, millions of page-views are affected 3. Conclusion: putting references/links/citations in an Article's Talk page is a bad idea (compared to External Links)
Numbers, source code, and lists of edits are provided in the link.
On Wed, 21 Dec 2011, Gwern Branwen wrote:
I have just completed and written up a little research project of mine: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#the-editing-community-...
The rest of that, about deletionism, may be at least as interesting.
I wonder how the ban on canvassing is affecting deletion. Our system is set up so that informing the very people who would be affected most by deleting an article is not permitted. (And of coruse, we have WP:OWN, which prevents even *recognizing* that some people may have a particular interest in an article not being deleted.)
And for the general problem is something I've often noted: Wikipedia is set up to force people to follow the rules. And the more you use "it's in the rules" as a club to hit bad users with, the more others can use it as a club to force bad ideas through; there's just no defense to "what I want follows the rules". You see this all the time for BLPs: "Don't you have any empathy? We're hurting a real person." "You're just trying to distract us from this rule. Your own personal feelings aren't an excuse to ignore our policies..."
An update: I managed to fix the double-counting problem I mentioned was skewing the numbers upwards, and fixed a few other issues. (In retrospect, the solution was almost trivial: just discard any URL that appears *twice* in the diff, since none of the edits would repeat an added link.)
The updated numbers are:
- My anime references: <8% - My non-anime references: <3% - Krebmarkt's references: <4% - Total references used: <4.15% of 1206
As one would expect from fixes removing false positives, all the new figures are smaller. I invite people to go through and double-check - everything you need is provided.
On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
The rest of that, about deletionism, may be at least as interesting.
Or it's a rant, depends on your own inclinations, I think. (I do well on things like belief calibration and avoided political bias on tests, but who knows whether my beliefs on Wikipedia are correct.) Sue Gardner liked it, at least.
I wonder how the ban on canvassing is affecting deletion. Our system is set up so that informing the very people who would be affected most by deleting an article is not permitted. (And of course, we have WP:OWN, which prevents even *recognizing* that some people may have a particular interest in an article not being deleted.)
It helps deletion, unsurprisingly; see the study quoted & linked in http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism#fn22
On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
This makes a lot of sense. Many times I've removed these from the article for valid reasons - text/link dumps, mal- or unformed sections, etc. - and placed them on talk so editors could use them for future edits.
They don't use them, as I've shown.
On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 9:46 PM, kgorman@berkeley.edu wrote:
This rate, without additional context, is meaningless. As Rob pointed out, there are many different reasons for moving references/links/citations from an article to a talk page, and unless you have more information about why people are moving these to talk pages, the rate at which they move back doesn't really mean anything. By labeling this rate a 'failure rate' you are strongly implying that success would be keeping the link in the article. I don't believe this is right - I believe that 'success' is doing what's best for the article.
Even if 99% of things that were moved to talk pages were not subsequently returned, I would not find this at all disturbing without evidence that a large portion of the removed things should not have been removed. Frankly, I would be surprised if 10% of things that I personally moved to talk pages were moved back in to the article space.
You and Rob have apparently completely missed the point of the exercise, the reason why I invested so much manual effort into this.
I didn't look at a bunch of anonymous edits, precisely because I *knew* someone would say 'oh they're from dirty anonymouses and so they are probably crappy links - why be bothered by a 10% or a 1% rate?' This is wrong, but it has a surface plausibility and there's no point in compiling data that can be so glibly dismissed.
So I looked *only* at known good links, links I and Krebmarkt had hand-selected as useful. Again, feel free to go through the links and look at them! My first 2 anime links were RSs for a director's next movie, and box office receipts; Krebmarkt's first 2 links were RS critics' reviews for manga that both have (note the present tense) 0 reviews in their articles. And so on.
There is a known rate at which these links ought to be included. It's
90%. (I am being charitable in not saying 99% or 100%.) The actual
inclusion rate is <10%. The difference should bother us.
On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 11:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
- Talk pages are where references/links/citations go to die; less
than 10% ever make it back
This makes a lot of sense. Many times I've removed these from the article for valid reasons - text/link dumps, mal- or unformed sections, etc. - and placed them on talk so editors could use them for future edits.