[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't agree.  It's better you admit you can't measure the thing you
want to talk about rather than passing off the measurement you can
make as something it isn't.

Though we can measure some more useful things, E.g. Are subjects which
are more popular on Wikipedia than on third-party sites (e.g. google)
older or newer articles.



Current events and pop culture get the most traffic due to factors
entirely unrelated to Wikipedia (they also get the most traffic in
Google, for example). Today's current events and pop culture articles
came late in Wikipedia's life (due to either the subject not existing
/ being well known in the past or due to the changing definition of
what belongs in Wikipedia).

So I'd _expect_ the most popular articles tend to be newer— and yet I
think that expectation tells us very little about the _usefulness_ of
the later created articles compared to the earlier ones.