Delirium wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
Ah, now I see: This "experiment" is, truth be told, an Alzheimer prevention program to make you remember your password! :-)
Seriously: While a scientific experiment is open in its outcome, it is in some way designed along an expectation, namely that your working hypothesis is correct. Only if the experiment shows that this hypothesis is false, you will consider altering or abandoning it.
At least in the science I'm familiar with, you might personally think that your hypothesis is correct (or else you would have hypothesized something else), but the *experiment* is supposed to be designed from the point of view of a skeptic who believes it to be false.
Technically, we'd have to run a second wikipedia, mirrored at the point where anaon article creation was disallowed on *one* of them, as a "negative control" :-)
Since practical reasons prevent us from doing that, we'll have to compare statistics to the last few month. We should also take opinions (yes!) from the "new pages patrol" people into acount, wether the creation of junk pages has dropped noticably.
Ultimately, to see if reality matches your hypothesis, you'll have to apply the conditions of that hypothesis to reality and see if it matches the expected outcome. That's what we are doing. If the results do not match our expectations, thus proving our theory wrong, we'll take the changes back; I have no doubt about this.
Magnus
(yes, I know the scientific hypothesis analogy is a little flawed...)