[WikiEN-l] While we're at it, NOR line-by-line

[Relata Refero]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:04 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 08/04/2008, Wily D <wilydoppelganger at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  Everything is contraversial, and every article has cranks &
> >  the passionate trying to push junk into it.
>
>
> See, this is actually entirely false. Almost no articles on Wikipedia
> are actually that controversial. (Greg Maxwell and Kim Bruning ran the
> numbers on this in January 2006.)
>
> As I said, this appears to be a damage limitation exercise on the
> extreme cases - and is problematic in that it's messing up things for
> the vast majority.
>
>
> - d.
>

I'd like to see those numbers.
Notwithstanding that possible result, I encourage you to imagine whether
you're looking at the right indicator. "Almost no articles" might be that
controversial, but is it also true that the "almost no" reader/editors are
exposed to controversial articles? I doubt that. What's actually true is
more trafficked articles are also likely to be more controversial. Hence the
junk problem is biased downwards by looking at our entire set of articles,
rather than our entire set of edits.


Second, I still haven't seen a decent example of it messing up things. On
the contrary, the examples I tend to be shown sound a great deal more
extreme than anything else.

RR