[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 18 April 2010 20:22, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

It's not a perfect metric, but it is probably the best one we can
actually measure. A metric we can't measure is completely useless.
When choosing a metric you always have to compromise between ease of
measurement and strength of correlation to the quantity you are
interested in.