[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 18 April 2010 20:47, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think how much people use something is a reasonable measure of how
useful it is. Maybe it is only useful for entertaining people or
useful for satisfying idle curiosity, but that is still a use. Perhaps
you mean how useful something is for a particular purpose. If so, you
need to say what purpose you are talking about.

> 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.

Given the proportion of our hits that come from Google (about half of
hits that don't come from people following links within Wikipedia), I
doubt there will be any significant difference between how often
something is viewed on Wikipedia and how often it is googled. Any
difference there is will tell you more about the ways different groups
of people do research than anything else.