[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 April 2010 19:54, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Apr 17, 2010, at 8:26 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>>>
>>> Wikipedia, and its community and bureaucracy, sucks in oh so many
>>> ways. But it does in fact work and produce something people find
>>> useful.
>>
>> I'm not entirely sure of this. It is accurate to say that Wikipedia is found useful by people - but I'm not sure the current community and bureaucratic structures have anything to do with why. I suspect the useful parts are unevenly distributed towards articles older than five years.
>
> Interesting hypothesis. It is testable, too - we just need a bot to
> sample a few thousand articles and compare their hits over the last
> month, say, with their creation dates. I suspect you are wrong,
> though, since you haven't accounted for current affairs articles and
> pop culture articles which are very popular, but not for long.


I think that is the wrong metric.  Lots of people look at the sex
articles, but that isn't an indication that our sex articles are
considered more useful than, say, our articles on rockets or
gemstones. Sex just happens to have near-universal appeal— Joe might
be interested in rocks, John might be interested in rockets, but they
both have some interest in sex.  As a result, "sex" a very popular
subject everwhere on the internet.  The same kind of comparison can be
made for celebrity subjects.

That a WP article gets a lot of traffic isn't always an indication
that the content is useful. Most of the people hitting the article
could be instantly hitting back because the article wasn't what they
wanted.

There are probably a hundred ways that we could try to measure
something here, but I doubt we would agree on any one of them as
measuring the right thing.