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

[Nathan]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> --



In which a discussion is repeatedly reframed as a confrontation, for no
apparent reason and to no apparent benefit.