Andrew Su wrote:
Their statistic that 50% of edits landed in new articles doesn't indicate quality or usefulness. It only says that carpet bombing might sometimes hit a target.
Perhaps there is some misunderstanding here in what the article said? The 50% of edits refers to edits *subsequent* to our bot effort, not the bot effort itself. If there is still confusion, I'm happy to clarify in more detail.
Yes, I understand this is about the subsequent manual edits. My analogy with carpet bombing needs to be clarified. Suppose we have a country with some strategic targets that we want to hit. If we carpet bomb everything, we will hit those targets, but many bombs will also be dropped outside of the targets.
Now, in a growing wiki the country (the whole) is the knowledge that readers have, and which they could potentially write about. The strategic targets are the actual edits they will contribute, which is a lot smaller than the whole country. Planting a lot of stubs is carpet bombing, dropping stubs on various topics, hoping to find the topics of those future manual edits. The 50% number in your report means that 50% of those future edits (targets) were hit by the stub carpet bombing. But that number doesn't say anything of the precision of the carpet bombing. How many of the planted stubs failed to attract any manual edits?
That would be an interesting study, especially if you could repeat it with different size and quality of the stubs.