Cross posting to wikitech-l
2009/5/8 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
Well, the wikipedia is big... google is big also.
One of the tricks google use is they try stuff out on victims... I mean users. They pick a small percentage of the internet and do something slightly different for them, and see if it works or not. The advantage of only doing it for a small number is that it means you can write the test with prototyping tools, rather than having to make it run fast, and you'll have a lot less complaints if it doesn't work very well. It also means you can do back-back comparisons stuff like: 'we tried this, and it showed a 23% improvement in referencing'.
I think if at all practical, the wikipedia needs to start doing stuff like that.
That sounds like an excellent idea to me. Is it achievable?