[WikiEN-l] Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[Anthony]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Seth Finkelstein wrote:
> >> 2. Will Citizendium become a top 1000 website within the next five
> years?
> >>
> >
> >       Depends on if Google does something to boost that sort of site.
> > (I think the *real*, crucial, irreplaceable, founder of Wikipedia, is
> Google)
> >
> I think you left out "inadvertent".  And in any case, let's look at the
> proposition.  Google could turn off Wikipedia's high hits tomorrow if
> they wanted to.  So far they haven't wanted to.  They could privilege CZ
> pages tomorrow, also, if they wanted to.  They might actually lose money
> on the first? They would then gain money on the second?  (Really?)
>
> Assuming the reality is that WP's high page ranking is because that is
> not an artefact but a situation of compatibility of Wikipedia's content
> model and Google's business model, you're not really expressing it the
> best way.  It is more like symbiosis.


I think you were better off characterizing it as "inadvertent", though
"inadvertent" only on the part of Google.  Wales is no stranger to SEO, many
of the early Wikipedians engaged in intentional google-bombing during the
early years, and the strong suggestion at Wikipedia:Copyrights to provide a
link back was quite intentionally meant to boost pagerank (and rank in other
search engines).  Furthermore in my opinion, Google far overvalues internal
links (and did so even more during the exponential growth phase of
Wikipedia), which is another factor which caused, and, to a much lesser
extent continues to cause, Wikipedia to be so highly ranked.  I think Google
would be a better company, and make more money, if they could fix these
problems, but 1) they're difficult problems to fix without introducing other
problems; and 2) it's unlikely to significantly effect Wikipedia anyway -
the cat's already out of the bag there.