Hoi, Steve please tell me /why /I am wrong in stead of resorting to a personal attack, not nice.
Thanks, for your recommendation to Harvard. However, given that I am of an age that working is more likely than studying, I hope that your recommendation is also good for Google.. :)
Thanks, GerardM
Steve schreef:
By golly I suppose you'd better just call Michigan State University and tell them the bad news.
Surely, when they read this INTERNET CONVERSATION they will surely see their folly in conducting this study. Gerard I think you'd better contact Harvard, too. Keeping your great wisdom from them is inhumane.
-S
On 3/21/07, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Given that the argument why only American people were included was the cost of international telephony, your argument sucks. By restricting the study to the United States it is explicitly about Wikipedia usage in the United States. When you want to come to a conclusion on any subject with respect to policies in the English language Wikipedia, the result will not reflect how this project works.
When you study left handed people, you will find only what is only true to left handed people by comparing the results to right handed people. Thanks, GerardM
Robert Brockway schreef:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
US Wikipedians will probably all be working on the English language Wikipedia. It means that all the skills and experience associated with small communities, working on an encyclopaedia that does not cover all subject matter. Working on languages where the community it is done for does not know what Wikipedia is, it is that experience that will be missing. In that way it will hardly cover the breadth of Wikipedia.
He doesn't claim to be attempting to cover the breadth of Wikipedia. Implicit in the post is that it concerns Wikipedia usage in the United States.
I find it is common for people to mistake limits placed on a study with a bias in the study. Let me give another example that might make this clearer. If a study concerns left handed people (one of the most commonly studied groups) then failing to include non-left handed people is not a bias in the study, it is a function of the limits of a study. Similarly if a study wanted only left handed US residents then the study would be about left handed US residents. This does not imply any bias in the study. Any study worthy of the name will go in to great detail when it comes to methodology of subject selection and any subsequent testing that is done.
It will be great when smaller WP communities are studied too but this study clearly isn't doing that.
Cheers,
Rob