[WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Carcharoth]

On 5/31/12, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On average, the articles concerned had less than 100 page views a day
> going off stats.grok.se, so by just a few days, most of the edits
> should have been reverted - if they were going to be, of course.

This assumes that page views correspond to people reading the pages. I
suspect that a lot of people viewing a page just scan briefly for what
they are looking for (I typically use Ctl+F to find something if I am
in a hurry), or realise they are in the wrong place and click away or
click onwards through another link. There is no way of measuring the
number of people that stop and carefully read a page as if they were
sitting down to do some bedtime or leisure reading, as opposed to just
looking up some factoid.

> And deletionists have no policy knowledge?

Deletionists are not the monolithic body of people that you seem to
think they are. Those with these tendencies (though I'm reluctant to
lump people under a label) vary widely in their knowledge of policy,
which should be no surprise.

I'm also puzzled by this view you have that removal of external links
is a form of deletionism. I've always understood deletionism to be the
removal of entire articles and restricting Wikipedia to a relatively
narrow set of articles. Removal of content within articles is a
completely different ballgame.

Carcharoth