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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 6:19 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I'm sure the numbers are false, but numbers are always false. You make
points which are equally true of any article's statistics on
stats.grok.se (including the most popular ones), and this
overestimation is counterbalanced by the many forms of
*under*estimation going into the stats.grok.se numbers, like not
counting page views on any mirrors at all. Unless you have a reason to
think that the net error, inclusive of all these sources, leads to
overestimation, pointing out the possible error is a bit sophomoric.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net