[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Philip Sandifer]

On Mar 8, 2008, at 5:02 AM, Matthew Brown wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Ian Woollard  
> <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 08/03/2008, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google
>>> rankings are high or low.
>>
>> Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though. Why would
>> people bother contributing if nobody reads it? Do our audience want  
>> us
>> to be high in google rankings? I would think so. A *lot* of people
>> find wikipedia articles that way. You more or less seem to be saying
>> you don't care about what our audience wants. Well, it's an argument.
>
> If Wikipedia has good content people will read it.  We have had little
> trouble finding readers without doing anything in particular to play
> to the search engines, and I suspect this will continue.

Well, and more to the point, we hit top ten Alexa status well before  
deletionism became as terrifyingly in vogue as it is now.

Remember our list of top 100 articles. It turns out our readers mostly  
do use us for anime and porn. Now, that means we should give really  
good anime and porn coverage. But the idea that if we allow these  
articles to flourish we'll lose readers is utterly unsupported by any  
evidence.

-Phil