On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 01:47, Andrew Alder wrote:
G'day Peter and the Group
At 07:39 AM 4/12/03 +0000, Peter Bartlett wrote:
. The not being realtime may be a plus or minus, this is the very
thing we tossed around a little in the Pump.
Certainly for Wikipedia contributors, realtime is best. But
perhaps not so for readers, who are after stable content.
As was pointed out on the pump, there is no reason to suppose that the pedia was any more "stable" when Google took its snapshot than it is at any other time..True. No argument at all with this.
But the probability that Google indexes a particular version is roughly proportional to the time for which that version is the current version. Therefore, the version presented by Google is on average more stable than the "current" version. I tried to point this out, but I'm afraid I didn't do it very clearly.
No, it's not; it's exactly the same. Consider (for ease of exposition) an article in the middle of an edit war. Three-quarters of the time it has version "A" (the "stable" version); one-quarter of the time it has version "B" (the "unstable" version). Then, three-quarters of the time, when the Google spider grabs and indexes this article, it will get version "A". Three-quarters of the time, if somebody did a full-text search on the "current" wikipedia database, they would get version "A". Exactly the same.
There's also the effect that Brion mentioned: even if Google happened to index a "stable" version when the current version was "unstable", the person would (by default) still end up reading the current, unstable version.
Carl Witty